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The importance of father’s age to schizophrenia risk

Molecular Psychiatry volume 19, page 530 (2014)Cite this article

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A recent paper reported an association between older paternal age at the time of conception of the child and higher mutation rate of single nucleotides.1 It was based on a sample of 78 trios, of which 65 offspring had either schizophrenia or autism, and may thus not be representative of the general population. The authors hypothesized these findings to be linked to epidemiological studies, showing that the higher the paternal age at the time of child’s birth, the higher the risk of schizophrenia. Here we show that paternal age-related de novo mutations cannot explain most of this association.

If the risk of schizophrenia was driven mainly by paternal age-related de novo mutations, then we would predict that this process would be found across the reproductive lifespan of the father, regardless of the age of the father when he had his first child. However, a recent finding suggested that this was not the case.2

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References

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Stanley Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and by grants from The Lundbeck Foundation, Denmark.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Centre for Register-Based Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    C B Pedersen, P B Mortensen & L Petersen

  2. Centre for Integrated Register-Based Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    C B Pedersen & P B Mortensen

  3. The Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research, iPSYCH, Aarhus, Denmark

    C B Pedersen, P B Mortensen & L Petersen

  4. Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research, The Park Centre for Mental Health, Richlands, QLD, Australia

    J McGrath

Authors
  1. C B Pedersen
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  2. J McGrath
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  3. P B Mortensen
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  4. L Petersen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to C B Pedersen.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Pedersen, C., McGrath, J., Mortensen, P. et al. The importance of father’s age to schizophrenia risk. Mol Psychiatry 19, 530 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2013.69

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