Study Confirms Link Between Advanced Maternal Age and Autism
Advanced maternal age is linked to a significantly elevated risk of having a child with autism, regardless of the father’s age, according to an exhaustive study of all births in California during the 1990s by UC Davis Health System researchers. Advanced paternal age is associated with elevated autism risk only when the father is older and the mother is under 30, the study found.
Published online today in the February issue of the journal Autism Research, the study, “Independent and Dependent Contributions of Advanced Maternal and Paternal Ages to Autism Risk,” is one of the largest population-based studies to quantify how each parent’s age — separately and together — affects the risk of having a child with autism.
The study found that the incremental risk of having a child with autism increased by 18 percent — nearly one fifth — for every five-year increase in the mother’s age. A 40-year-old woman’s risk of having a child later diagnosed with autism was 50 percent greater than that of a woman between 25 and 29 years old.
Advanced parental age is a known risk factor for having a child with autism. However, previous research has shown contradictory results regarding whether it is the mother, the father or both who contribute most to the increased risk of autism. For example, one study reported that fathers over 40 were six times more likely than fathers under 30 to have a child with autism. (more…)
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Robots May Soon Teach Autistic Children
Wired participant plays the nerf basketball game.(Courtesy Vanderbilt University/John Russell.)
The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state.
“There is a lot of research going on around the world today trying to use robots to treat children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has shown that the children are attracted to robots, raising the promise that appropriately designed robots could play an important role in their treatment,” says Nilanjan Sarkar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University. “However, the efforts so far have been quite limited because they haven’t had a way to monitor the emotional state of the children, which would allow the robot to respond automatically to their reactions.”
If these limitations can be overcome, the use of robots to treat children with ASD could have a significant social and financial impact. One baby in every 150 born today in the United States is diagnosed with ASD, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. Currently, treatment of these children involves a combination of behavioral, educational, physical, occupational and speech therapies, sometimes accompanied by medication for co-occurring conditions such as anxiety, irritability, bi-polar and other disorders. The average cost of caring for one person with autism for life is $3.2 million. In total, autism currently costs the U.S. more than $90 billion per year, and that cost is projected to double by 2017 due to the growing population of those affected. (more…)
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