A 10-year study examining 4.9 million births in the 1990s has found more evidence that there's a link between autism and the mother's age at conception.
"The risk of having a child with full syndrome autism increases with maternal age," concluded researchers at the University of California, Davis, who examined data from all births in their state for the decade. The findings are published in the February issue of the journal Autism Research.
The link between the parents' age and children's health is not entirely new. Prior studies have indicated that babies born to older women have higher risks of birth defects, low birth weight and certain chromosome problems, such as Down syndrome.
A 2007 Kaiser Permanente study conducted in California reported that autism risk increased with both the mother's and father's age. An Israeli study based in statistics from 1980s had isolated only paternal age as being linked with increased risk for autism.
Dr. Max Wiznitzer, a pediatric neurologist at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, said the latest research had a far larger sample size.
Autism is a growing disorder; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that one in 110 children had the condition in 2006. But its causes remain unknown.
Video: Mother's age tied to autism
In the latest study, researchers found that mothers over the age of 40 had 51 percent higher odds of having children with autism compared with mothers between the ages 25 and 29.
The father's age also played a factor, but only when he had a child with a woman under 30. - CNN.com
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