Grandmothers age has effect on chance for autism?

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Just came across this and found it interesting:
http://www.bionews.org.uk/page_58157.asp

That's very interesting.

my grandmother was 20 when my mother was born....though i also heard maternal stress can increase the chances for autism..........my mother had quite a bit of stress (my dad shot a gun towards her, yelled at her, left her, beat her, my maternal grandparents moved away....all while she was pregnant with me.

AS and age topic

My grandmother gave birth to my mother at 30, and my uncle at 40. My uncle's first son has autistic traits, and I have AS. My brother is Tourette's. My brother and I were born after my mother's 30th birthday.

I have two children born well after my 30th. Maybe I will ge lucky and have an AS grandchild.

Again, are these studies valid? Maternal age may be a factor, but my father was AS and his mother was 20 when he was born. My grandmother was born when her mother was in her early 20s, so go figure. Probabilities, maybe, but of course not every case.

Yes, of course we are talking probabilities here rather than direct cause and effect. Even an identical twin of someone with autism has only 60% chance of also having autism and only 90% having some traits. The age thing just seems to have a substantial (2x/3x etc) effect on the probabilities.

In my case my grandmother was late 40s when my mother was born so I suppose that would have increased the chances a bit.
Add to that the fact that my dad was likely aspie or pretty close to that and the probabilities are stacking up for me.

That's interesting, my grandma was about 40 when my mom was born.

Hmmm.. I can't see the logic here.

My parents were both over 40 when I was born and they were both the youngest child of much older grandparents.

I can imagine that an older mother might have problems with her children but I don't see how this could affect the second generation.

At this point any actual causal method is purely speculation but one way this can occur is through the fact that the genes that a mother will eventually pass on to her children are already set in her oviaries at the time she is born. These only mature at different stages in her life but she does not manufacture them through her life - they were there from before she was born. Unlike the male that manufactures new spermcells throughout his life. This means that, should there be some effect from age that affects the formation of the cells in the oviaries of the baby then these genetic effects could be locked in at that point to eventually emerge in the future children. This means that a mother could essentually carry predisposing anomolies in some of her eggcells while not in others as the anolomies are not due to her genetics but could be due to subtle mutations caused by "environmental" factors when her oviaries were forming.
Like I said, at this point we just do not know what causes it but this would be one mechanism by which it could happen.

My 14 week old son, mother was 33.
My mother was 32 when i was born
Her Mother was 33 when she was born.
Her Mother was 32 when she was born
*sigh* only 28 on the next generation, and 26 on the previous, though 46 on the oldest generation in my family tree.

The age as a mother thing, i can see causation arising....

The age as a grandmother... well, i'll give you a rundown here...

If you have a) have children when over 30... worse over 40, it is statistically more likely that you have MORE children then someone who only had children up to say 25.

If you have more children, you are likely to have more grandchildren.

If you had children to a later point in life, your children observed you having more children... And into later life. Thus they are more likely to copy you and do the same thing. Thus even more increasing the number of children you have.

If you have children later in life, they are more apt to show AS/ASD traits, even if not diagnosed or even ever noticed, if AS/ASD is genetic at all, that increases the chance of their children having AS/ASD.

Thus... the grandmother who had children late in life, would be statistically more likely to have a) more grandchildren, thus increasing the chance of having AS/ASD grandchildren, even though not proportionally.. just in raw numbers... and b) More grandchildren of mothers age 30+, thus not only increasing in raw numbers, but proportionately, because we know AS/ASD is more likely of older mothers.

Memetic driving, along with genetic heredity, and genetic mutation (which i have to assume increases with mother's age) all work together to produce the new super-race.

Long live the aspie! Down with NT's.

This is interesting. I think I might (maybe, can't remember) have heard before that even though autism affects more boys than girls it is more likely to be inherited from the mother's side of the family. And I've often thought conditions in the womb have a part to play (I've heard of identical twins where one is autistic and one is not.) But I'd never heard of the grandmothers age hypothesis before. As Wombat says, it's difficult to see how it would work.
Anyway, my grandmother was in her late 30s when she had my mum.

I think you mean to say there if a correlation between grandma's age and autism.

ruveyn

correlation would be all that could be concluded by such.

Causation would require far more detailed studies... if it were even realistically possible.

Lets also be realistic, the test group was only 86 members... granted the control group was 13,914.
This makes the study look more substantial than it is... The error in such a small study is still VERY high.

What's interesting is that my great-grandmother on my dad's side probably was on the spectrum from what I've heard, but obviously, she wasn't diagnosed. My maternal grandmother was 30 when she had my mom, who was her youngest.