Parental age difference and schizophrenia

Abstract

Comments on an article by S. Zammit et al (see record 2003-09773-007), which investigated the association between paternal germ cell mutations or heritable personality traits and schizophrenia. To offer hypotheses based simply on clinical experience is pathetically out of date. Perhaps it may be allowed, for a moment, in deference to my advancing years. Fifty years ago, with some other purpose in mind, I surveyed some 370 cases of schizophrenia in young men. In decades of practice since, my impression has remained that this association with schizophrenia occurs a little too often to be accidental. It is therefore gratifying now to find that, at long last, my hypothesis has been solidly supported, albeit inadvertently, by the author. They demonstrate, in a 26-year follow-up of some 50 000 teenagers, that advancing paternal age is a risk factor for schizophrenia, while maternal age is not - the latter being a significant negative finding to which, however, they pay no further attention. This does away with their hypothesis that advancing paternal age is pathogenic for schizophrenia by virtue of increasing germ cell mutations. There is no need to invoke genetic mutation with age, given the linkage they have uncovered, in passing, between parental age difference and schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)