The idea that older women have an increased risk of having a child with autism has received a lot of press. Many women trying to juggle families and careers weigh this carefully while making their plans. The medical profession did a good job getting the word out on this.
What is not generally known, however, is that children of older fathers also face increased risks of certain illnesses, including, notably, autism and schizophrenia. That has been known to researchers for some time, but medicine has done a terrible job of getting the word out on fathers. A paper appearing today in Nature, however, has attracted a lot of attention and could begin to change that.
Over at The Wall Street Journal, Gautam Naik is a little bit fuzzy about what precisely is new in the Nature paper; he mostly discusses the risks associated with older fathers, and does not report, until the end of his post, that this study actually counted the number of mutations contributed by fathers and calculated how quickly that number rises with age. Anyone who reads to the end will get the story, but not everyone does.
Jennifer Warner at WebMD has a similar problem with her lede: "The father’s age may matter more than the mother’s when it comes to the risk of some disorders like autism in children," she writes. That's old news. She gets to the news–the increasing number of mutations–in the next couple of grafs.
Elizabeth Lopatto, writing for Bloomberg News in a story picked up by The Washington Post, makes a neat distinction:
Children of older fathers are known to be more at risk for diseases including schizophrenia and autism. Now, a new scientific look at the genes passed down within families may have pinpointed a reason why.
Cathy Payne at USA Today writes three grafs and quotes from a press release. Try harder next time?
Rosie Mestel at The Los Angeles Times turns in a competent piece, but misses a bet in her lede. She writes, "Scientists have pinpointed a likely source for many cases of autism and schizophrenia: Men who become fathers later in life pass on more brand-new genetic mutations to their offspring." That's OK, but she has a better lede in a quote near the bottom, in which a researcher tells her that it's been known that aged sperm has more mutations, but what's "striking" about the new study is the "magnitude and extent of the effect." Some paraphrase of that would have made a stronger lede, I think.
The New York Times puts a story by Benedict Carey on page 1, and from what I can see online, leads the paper with it–astonishingly. The home page of the website, however, buries the story way below the featured news, three-quarters of the way down the page, in minuscule type, in a tiny science box. And even there, it falls below news that the Mars rover moved 23 feet. So, folks, is this a page 1 story or not? Who's the captain of the ship here?
Blame that confusion on the editors, not Carey, who turns in the best story that I read today, precisely delineating what's new about today's study and what it means. Unfortunately, if you'd like to comment on Carey's story, you're already too late. It's before 10 am on the day the story appeared, and comments are closed. Blame the editors again.
For a short, smart commentary on Carey's story, and men's biological clocks, see Lisa Belkin, the parenting maven at The Huffington Post.
————–
Updates: Bora Zivkovic at Scientific American alerted me to a post by Virginia Hughes for the Simmons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. It's a bit more tech-y than Carey's story, but has some useful detail that some readers might like to see. And I found a nice piece in Nature's news section by Ewen Callaway. Richard Knox wrote a post for NPR which likewise nicely summarizes the research, except for one small thing. Near the end, he writes:
One cautionary factoid: While the age of fatherhood has increased more that 30 percent since 1980, autism diagnoses have gone up 10-fold. So it doesn't look like paternal age is the only explanation.
I usually think of a factoid as something that is not a fact but resembles one; I think Knox means "factoid" to mean "fact." In any case, this seems like an important point, but it's not attributed. Says who?
-Paul Raeburn
Leave a Reply