In September, I noted a study that found the risk of children with autism rises with advanced paternal age, the results of which some in the autism community have questioned. Today the results of a new study were made public which indicates that the brain disorder may be linked to genetics in a more complex way than previously known.
You can get information on the new study at www.autismspeaks.org
Also, Sunday's New York Times featured a story on autism's impact on unaffected siblings. The upshot: The experience lead some siblings to become more mature and caring than their peers.
Monday, February 19, 2007
More on autism
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4 comments:
The CDC statistics make sobering reading - 1 in every 100 in New Jersey. [Also in the UK] but I don't think that their data included the parents' ages [or maybe that information just wasn't published]
Best wishes
I agree. As someone with an infant at home, it's been frightening to see the revised statistics come out.
The genetics study that was just published is nice because it is culled from a large worldwide sample. One of the criticisms of the paternal age study was that it was based on one area (Isreal) on data that was like 20 years old.
I spoke with one parent of an autistic child in the fall and asked her about the age issue. She is not an older parent and said when she looked around her support group she didn't see a lot of older parents either.
The Autism Speaks web site has really good information, including video clips of interviews with their experts, available here: http://autismspeaks.org/whatisit/interviews.php as well as video clips from news programs related to autism, http://autismspeaks.org/whatisit/video.php
I just heard that Ira Flatow will be discussing the new research on the genetics of autism on his Science Friday show on NPR. A preview of Friday's show is on the his web site, wwww.sciencefriday.com , and the archived audio should be here after the program runs as well.
There is one state currently studying paternal age and autism.
http://ebdblog.com/paternalage/
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