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The paper
W. Yassin et al., “Paternal age contribution to brain white matter aberrations in autism spectrum disorder,” Psychiatry Clin Neurosci, doi:10.1111/pcn.12909, 2019.
In the past few years, a number of high-profile studies have linked parental age at birth, and paternal age in particular, with a child’s autism risk. Walid Yassin, a neuropsychiatric researcher at the University of Tokyo, wanted to know if having older parents correlated with characteristics of the brain that have been linked to autism.
When Yassin and his colleagues examined the brain scans of 39 adult males with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and of 37 typically developing males, they found that paternal age correlated with characteristics of the white matter in regions of the brain responsible for social interactions in analyses of all 76 individuals. Specifically, in the men with older fathers, these areas had higher radial diffusivity, a measure of water ...
