Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders

New submitter optimus_phil writes "New Scientist magazine reports on findings that suggest that delaying fatherhood may increase the risk of fathering children with disorders such as Apert syndrome, autism and schizophrenia. The article reports that 'although there is a big increase in risk for many disorders, it's a big increase in a very small risk. A 40-year-old is about 50 per cent more likely to father an autistic child than a 20-year-old is, for instance, but the overall risk is only about 1 per cent to start with.'"

Comments

and the risks of marriage delays parenthood

[Anonymous Coward]

With a 50% divorce rate in the US, if you have children and you're the primary wage earner, it is likely you
1) Pay for kids that you only get to see 20% of the time
2) Pay your ex-spouse for his'/her's decision/ability to make less money than you do
3) Pay your ex-spouse's legal bills so that person can cause you as much pain as possible in court
I think it is a horrible deal.
And the legal system becomes the other person's weapon to abuse you.
Miss a payment, and you're screwed.
If you want children, donate your source code.
If you want to raise kids, date someone who has nice kids.

Actually, Alois Schicklgruber was quite abusive

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller devoted twenty years to treating the very worst kinds of child abuse, then decided to stop all treatment of actual patients in hopes of putting a permanent end to that child abuse by writing a great many profoundly insightful books.

Her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing And The Roots Of Violence has just four chapters. One of the chapters makes a pretty good case for Adolf Hitler, World War II, NAZI Germany and the Holocaust all being to the fact that Alois Schicklgruber beat the young Adolf Schicklgruber every single day of his young life.

One day when he was thirteen or so - I don't clearly recall when - Adolf stood stoically and calmly for his beating, then at the end of it, told his father how many times his father had hit him, thanked him then calmly walked away. Everyone who witnessed this thought Adolf had gone insane. Perhaps he had.

Most of Miller's books are hugely popular with mental health professionals. Powells always has a whole bunch of copies of each book on its shelves in Portland, Oregon.

Quite likely you can find For Your Own Good in any decent bookstore.

I expect they've been translated to many languages. I'm not sure but I think Miller's Mother Tongue was German. She spoke English, but not very well, so the English-language editions of her books are all translated by experts.

"Just" 1% ?

[cellocgw]

Personally I view a significant cogitative or social defect that has a one-percent chance of ocurring to be unacceptably high. That's several kids in each class year in any medium-sized elementary school.

So, yes, I would consider an increase from 1% to 1.5% to be important. Granted, reducing the base probability would be far more useful than dealing with the age-related increase, but either way, these are large numbers compared with, say the usual "cancer risk increases by 5x" headlines which ignore the base risk being maybe 1E-6.