Anti-dork spin: Maybe guys likely to have autistic kids tend not to become dads as early as other guys.
That is from Slate. Here is Steve Levitt on the same. Here is The Washington Post and the effect appears very large indeed.
Addendum: Using bacteria to fight autism. And here is a satirical (?) treatment of the causes of autism.
I’ve seen a lot of speculation here & on other blogs as to who would be a late-life father. The speculation seems to be about American society. But to make sense, the speculative propensity would have to be a propensity of ISRAELI fathers who marry late, because the whole research project was on Israeli data:
“The research involved about 130,000 Israeli Jews born in the 1980s. Those fathered by older men were almost six times more likely to have autism or related disorders than those fathered by men younger than 30, and more than one and a half times more likely than children fathered by men ages 30-39.” — from the article posted by Yahoo.
Jason, that’s really good thinking.
It should be trivial, given the data set,
for the researchers to look at siblings.
This would allow them to pin down the genetic
component of late-life dads (i.e. sperm breakdown)
versus the selection component.
If the “bad sperm” theory is true, the younger
siblings should have increasing chances of autism.
If the selection theory is true, then children
born to older dads should have a higher chance of autism
if they have no older siblings.
Finally, if there’s some other causal factor,
e.g. first-born children are more likely to have autism
in general for some unexplained reason, then that could
also generate this older-dad finding, because older dads
likely have fewer children, and so a larger percentage
of those kids are first-born.
There’s a lot of good follow-up research to be done, here.
If you don’t email the authors, I will.
One of the posters at Steve Levitt’s blog sited this article about the connection between engineer fathers and autism.
http://www.int-pediatrics.org/PDF/Volume%2017/17-1/pd%2060-61%20mearns.pdf
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