Whitley, E;
Deary, IJ;
Der, G;
Batty, GD;
Benzeval, M;
(2012)
Paternal age in relation to offspring intelligence in the West of Scotland Twenty-07 prospective cohort study.
PLoS One
, 7
(12)
, Article e52112. 10.1371/journal.pone.0052112.
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Abstract
Background The adverse effects of advancing maternal age on offspring's health and development are well understood. Much less is known about the impact of paternal age. Methods We explored paternal age-offspring cognition associations in 772 participants from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study. Offspring cognitive ability was assessed using Part 1 of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4) test of General Intelligence and by reaction time (RT). Results There was no evidence of a parental age association with offspring RT. However, we observed an inverse U-shaped association between paternal age and offspring AH4 score with the lowest scores observed for the youngest and oldest fathers. Adjustment for parental education and socioeconomic status somewhat attenuated this association. Adjustment for number of, particularly older, siblings further reduced the scores of children of younger fathers and appeared to account for the lower offspring scores in the oldest paternal age group. Conclusion We observed a paternal age association with AH4 but not RT, a measure of cognition largely independent of social and educational experiences. Factors such as parental education, socioeconomic status and number of, particularly older, siblings may play an important role in accounting for paternal age-AH4 associations. Future studies should include parental intelligence.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Paternal age in relation to offspring intelligence in the West of Scotland Twenty-07 prospective cohort study. |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0052112 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0052112 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2012 Whitley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The West of Scotland Twenty-07 Study is funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) (MC_US_A540_53462). E Whitley, M Benzeval (MC_US_A540_5TK10) and G Der (MC_US_A540_5TK30) are funded by the MRC. The Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology is supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the MRC, and the University of Edinburgh as part of the cross-council Lifelong Health and Wellbeing initiative. GD Batty is a Wellcome Trust Fellow. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Epidemiology and Public Health |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1381440 |
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