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Paternal age and risk for schizophrenia

Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, UK

PETER ALLEBECK, MD

Department of Social Medicine, Gothenburg University, Sweden

CHRISTINA DALMAN, MD

Psychiatric Epidemiology, Stockholm Centre of Public Health, Sweden

INGVAR LUNDBERG, MD and TOMAS HEMMINGSON, PhD

Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

MICHAEL J. OWEN, FRCPsych

Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff, UK

GLYN LEWIS, PhD

Division of Psychiatry, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Correspondence: Dr S.G. Zammit, Department of Psychological Medicine, University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff CF14 4XN, UK. Tel: +44 (0)2920 743058; fax: +44 (0)2920 746595; e-mail:zammits{at}cardiff.cardiff.ac.ac.uk

Declaration of interest None. Funding detailed in Acknowledgements.

Background Previously reported associations between advancing paternal age and schizophrenia could be due to an increase in paternal germ cell mutations or be confounded by heritable personality traits associated with schizophrenia that result in delayed parenthood.

Aims To investigate this association while adjusting for personality traits related to poor social integration in the subjects.

Method A cohort of 50 087 adolescent males was followed up by record linkage to determine hospital admissions for schizophrenia between 1970 and 1996.

Results Advancing paternal age was associated with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia in a‘dose-dependent’manner. The adjusted odds ratio for each 10-year increase in paternal age was 1.3 (95% CI1.0–1.5; P=0.015).

Conclusions Advancing paternal age is an independent risk factor for schizophrenia. Adjusting for social integration in subjects made little difference to this association, consistent with the hypothesis that advancing paternal age may increase liability to schizophrenia owing to accumulating germ cell mutations.

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