Ever since reading West Hunter I’ve been intrigued by the idea of mutational load as an explanation for increasing prevalence of mental disorders. It would mean chance of having these disorders would increase with increasing paternal age, and in fact that’s what we find. Since everyone’s waiting longer to have babies nowadays, that explains some of the change.
I wonder if increasing paternal age explains even more of the change than that article lets on, just because it’s accumulating over generations; it’s not just that your dad was older, it’s that your grandfather was older and therefore your father started with more mutations and so on. You can’t measure that effect just by separating people into autistic and neurotypical and then asking them how old their fathers were.
Why do you think it’s accumulating over generations? It hasn’t been recently in Iceland, at least:
Stefánsson’s team scanned demographic records in Iceland for the average paternal age starting in 1650. From 1900 to 1980, as the Icelandic population transitioned from agricultural to industrial living, the average paternal age dropped from 34.9 to 27.9 years. In the subsequent 30 years, however, thanks to better education and higher contraception use, the average age has gone back up, to 33 years in 2011.
I would certainly expect that the category “bad effects of lifestyle changes favored by highly educated researchers” would be understudied, relative to studying the nasty effects of poor-folks culture.
Ever since reading West Hunter I’ve been intrigued by the idea of mutational load as an explanation for increasing prevalence of mental disorders. It would mean chance of having these disorders would increase with increasing paternal age, and in fact that’s what we find. Since everyone’s waiting longer to have babies nowadays, that explains some of the change.
I wonder if increasing paternal age explains even more of the change than that article lets on, just because it’s accumulating over generations; it’s not just that your dad was older, it’s that your grandfather was older and therefore your father started with more mutations and so on. You can’t measure that effect just by separating people into autistic and neurotypical and then asking them how old their fathers were.
Why do you think it’s accumulating over generations? It hasn’t been recently in Iceland, at least:
I would certainly expect that the category “bad effects of lifestyle changes favored by highly educated researchers” would be understudied, relative to studying the nasty effects of poor-folks culture.