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Tero Toivanen

New study confirms link between advanced maternal age and autism - 4 views

www.physorg.com/news184848483.html

autism maternal age risk research

shared by Tero Toivanen on 09 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Advanced maternal age is linked to a significantly elevated risk of having a child with autism, regardless of the father's age, according to an exhaustive study of all births in California during the 1990s by UC Davis Health System researchers.
  • The researchers note that understanding the relationship between increased parental age and autism risk is critical to understanding its biological causes. Earlier studies have observed that advanced maternal age is a risk factor for a variety of other birth-related conditions, including infertility, early fetal loss, low birth-weight, chromosomal aberrations and congenital anomalies.
  • One possible clue comes from a 2008 UC Davis study that found some mothers of children with autism had antibodies to fetal brain protein, while none of the mothers of typical children did. Advancing age has been associated with an increase in autoantibody production.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • They added that some persistent environmental chemicals accumulate in the body and also may have a role to play in autism, possibly contributing to the apparent effect of parental age.
  • The study also suggests that epigenetic changes over time "may enable an older parent to transfer a multitude of molecular functional alterations to a child ... thus epigenetics may be involved in the risks contributed by advancing parental age as a result of changes induced by stresses from environmental chemicals, co-morbidity or assistive reproductive therapy."
  • Tero Toivanen on 09 Feb 10
     
    Advanced maternal age is linked to a significantly elevated risk of having a child with autism, regardless of the father's age, according to an exhaustive study of all births in California during the 1990s by UC Davis Health System researchers.
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