It was already known that men who father children later in their life are much more likely to have autistic children than younger men, but new research has found that this effect extends to their grandchildren also. This new research shows that risk factors for autism can accumulate over generations, much in the same way as radiation damage and chemical exposure can.
The new findings are the result of a collaboration between King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Queensland Brain Institute in Australia.
“By using Swedish national registers, researchers identified 5,936 individuals with autism and 30,923 healthy controls born in Sweden since 1932. They had complete data on each individual’s maternal and paternal grandfathers’ age of reproduction and details of any psychiatric diagnosis.” Read full article.
