There was a statistically significant increase in the odds of Klinefelter syndrome with increasing paternal age.

Arch Dis Child. 2010 Jun 28. [Epub ahead of print]

Case-control analysis of paternal age and trisomic anomalies.
De Souza E, Morris JK; EUROCAT Working Group.

Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Charterhouse Square, London, UK.

Abstract
Objectives To determine whether older paternal age increases the risk of fathering a pregnancy with Patau (trisomy 13), Edwards (trisomy 18), Klinefelter (XXY) or XYY syndrome. Design Case-control: cases with each of these syndromes were matched to four controls with Down syndrome from within the same congenital anomaly register and with maternal age within 6 months. Setting Data from 22 EUROCAT congenital anomaly registers in 12 European countries. Participants Diagnoses with observed or (for terminations) predicted year of birth from 1980 to 2005, comprising live births, fetal deaths with gestational age >/=20 weeks and terminations after prenatal diagnosis of the anomaly. Data include 374 cases of Patau syndrome, 929 of Edwards syndrome, 295 of Klinefelter syndrome, 28 of XYY syndrome and 5627 controls with Down syndrome. Main outcome measures Odds ratio (OR) associated with a 10-year increase in paternal age for each anomaly was estimated using conditional logistic regression. Results were adjusted to take account of the estimated association of paternal age with Down syndrome (1.11; 95% CI 1.01 to 1.23). Results The OR for Patau syndrome was 1.10 (95% CI 0.83 to 1.45); for Edwards syndrome, 1.15 (0.96 to 1.38); for Klinefelter syndrome, 1.35 (1.02 to 1.79); and for XYY syndrome, 1.99 (0.75 to 5.26). Conclusions There was a statistically significant increase in the odds of Klinefelter syndrome with increasing paternal age. The larger positive associations of Klinefelter and XYY syndromes with paternal age compared with Patau and Edwards syndromes are consistent with the greater percentage of these sex chromosome anomalies being of paternal origin.

PMID: 20584846 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Scientists show children of older fathers face a higher risk of a type of lymphoma

Scientists show children of older fathers face a higher risk of a type of lymphoma


By Wayne Lewis


Risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is higher for children of older men, according to City of Hope researchers — a finding that adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that men, too, may have a biological clock.

The study is one of the first to examine the relationship between parents’ age and their adult offspring’s likelihood of facing cancers of the blood and immune system. Yani Lu, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Cancer Etiology, led the study, which was released online in the American Journal of Epidemiology on June 3.

Yani Lu (Photo by p.cunningham)

“As a man, you may think, ‘I can have a baby at 50 or 60 and live long enough to see him go through college.’ But there may be other risks for your child down the line, and you may want to be conscious of those risks,” said Lu.

Lu’s research drew upon data from the California Teachers Study. Initiated in 1995, this project tracks the health, lifestyle choices and demographic information of nearly 133,500 female teachers and administrators in the California public schools’ retirement system. The teachers study is led by Leslie Bernstein, Ph.D., director of the Division of Cancer Etiology in the Department of Population Sciences and Lu’s mentor.

In the latest project, researchers focused on 110,999 women, 819 of whom had been diagnosed with a hematological malignancy. The study revealed that participants born to fathers older than age 40 faced a 59 percent greater risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma compared to similar women born to fathers younger than 25.

“For adult-onset malignancies, people seldom think back” to factors early in life, Lu said. “Diagnosis for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma occurs closer to the age of 70, so why would in utero factors be related to risk?”

In the study, the fathers’ age had no effect on risk for acute myeloid leukemia or multiple myeloma. Maternal age did not significantly influence risk for blood cancers.

Science has shown that the ticking biological clock is associated with a higher incidence of health issues in children of older mothers. These women face greater risk of miscarriage and increased risks of bearing children with low birth weight or serious health issues such as Down’s syndrome. A recent, large study suggested that children of women over 40 have a greater chance of having autism.

Similar findings among older fathers are scanty, although research going back almost 100 years suggests that these men are more likely to produce children with certain rare birth defects. Numerous studies also show that offspring of older men have a greater risk of developing schizophrenia.

As Lu noted, however, a burgeoning field of research suggests a father’s age at conception may play a more significant role in his progeny’s health than once thought. Recent investigations indicate that children of older fathers have a greater chance of prostate and breast cancers in adulthood as well as some blood cancers during childhood.

Lu believes the male biological clock might relate to mutations that can accumulate in a man’s reproductive cells over the course of a lifetime. Such cells divide more rapidly than a woman’s reproductive cells. More divisions lead to more chances for abnormalities to arise.

Older parental age also appears to be associated with longer length of offspring’s telomeres, the end caps on chromosomes, which might be linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma risk, Lu suggested.

Because non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is actually a cluster of related diseases with about 30 subtypes, Lu plans to examine how paternal age and other health factors during the early years of life influence risk for specific disease subtypes.

Sophia S. Wang, Ph.D., associate professor of population sciences, was the paper’s senior author. The National Institutes of Health and the California Breast Cancer Research Fund funded the research.

The relation between maternal schizophrenia and low birth weight is modified by paternal age.

Can J Psychiatry. 2010 Jun;55(6):377-85.

The relation between maternal schizophrenia and low birth weight is modified by paternal age.
Lin HC, Lee HC, Tang CH, Chen YH.

Professor, School of Health Care Administration, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract
Objective: Paternal characteristics have never been considered in the relation between maternal schizophrenia and adverse pregnancy outcomes. The aim of our study was to consider different paternal ages while investigating the relation between maternal schizophrenia and low birth weight (LBW), using a nationwide population-based dataset. Method: Our study used data from the 2001 to 2003 Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Dataset and birth certificate registry. A total of 543 394 singleton live births were included. We performed multivariate logistic regression analyses to explore the relation between maternal schizophrenia and the risk of LBW, taking different paternal age groups into account (aged 29 years or younger, 30 to 39 years, and 40 years and older), and after adjusting for other characteristics of infant, mother, and father as well as the difference between the parent's ages. Results: Mothers with schizophrenia had a higher percentage of LBW infants than mothers who did not (11.8%, compared with 6.8%). For infants whose mothers had schizophrenia, the adjusted odds ratios of LBW were 1.47 (95% CI 1.02 to 2.27, P < 0.05) and 2.80 (95% CI 1.42 to 5.51, P < 0.01) times greater than for infants whose mothers did not have schizophrenia, for paternal age groups of 30 to 39 years and 40 years or older, respectively. However, maternal schizophrenia was not a significant predictor of LBW for infants whose fathers were aged 29 years and younger. Conclusions: The relation between LBW and maternal schizophrenia is modified by paternal age. More attention should be paid to the interaction of paternal characteristics and maternal psychiatric disorders in producing adverse pregnancy outcomes.

[Age of the father and health status of the children (2)]

Rev Med Suisse. 2010 Mar 31;6(242):694-5.

[Age of the father and health status of the children (2)]
[Article in French]

Nau JY.

jeanyves.nau@gmail.com

PMID: 20440994 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

In females but not in males, increasing paternal age was associated with a linear increased risk of suicide (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.13, 95% confidence

J Nerv Ment Dis. 2010 Jun;198(6):404-411.

Advanced Paternal Age, Mortality, and Suicide in the General Population.
Miller B, Alaräisänen A, Miettunen J, Järvelin MR, Koponen H, Räsänen P, Isohanni M, Kirkpatrick B.

*Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, Georgia; daggerDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland; double daggerDivision of Epidemiology, Public Health, and Primary Care, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom; section signDepartment of Public Health and General Practice, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland; and paragraph signDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Kuopio, Kuopio, Finland.

Abstract
Advanced paternal age is a risk factor for adverse health outcomes in the offspring. In a population-based birth cohort from Finland, 10,965 singleton offspring born in 1966 and alive at age 1 were followed to age 39. Hazard ratios were calculated, adjusting for maternal age, gender, paternal social class, and maternal parity. In females but not in males, increasing paternal age was associated with a linear increased risk of suicide (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.13, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.04-1.24, p < 0.01) and all-causes mortality (HR = 1.06, 95% CI = 1.01-1.10, p = 0.02). Increasing maternal age was associated with a significantly decreased risk of suicide (HR = 0.93, 95% CI = 0.86-1.00, p = 0.04) and all-causes mortality (HR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.93-1, p = 0.02) in the entire cohort. For paternal age >/=30, the population attributable risk percentage was 13.7% for all deaths and 7.5% for suicides. Parental age at birth may affect suicide and all-causes mortality risk in the offspring in the general population. The causal pathways and specific disorders associated with this increased mortality are largely unknown.

PMID: 20531118 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]