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ASPartOfMe
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23 Apr 2015, 10:53 pm

Full Journal article
Paternal sperm DNA methylation associated with early signs of autism risk in an autism-enriched cohort - International Journal of Epidemiology

Medscape article - Interview with study authors
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/843621

Can you be paranoid if they are really out to get us?

Quote:
Discussing how the findings could be used in the future, Dr Fallin commented: "Our perspective in doing this research is to understand the fundamental biology of autism, with the goal that if you knew the fundamental biology, you could design prevention or intervention strategies.


Bolding mine


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ytrewq
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24 Apr 2015, 11:37 am

Fully understanding this paper calls for more expertise than I have, but if I'm parsing this correctly, they looked for a correlation with paternal age (and didn't find one in this sample) -- but they don't appear to have corrected for paternal age in examining the correlation with localized DNA methylation. Which could be significant, since localized hypermethylation is correlated with aging (although I don't know if that applies specifically to these loci).

And there are plausible reasons for the correlation between paternal age and autism observed in other studies that have nothing to do with genetic or epigenetic factors. Just as the old "refrigerator mother" theories may have drawn their plausibility from the fact that autistic mothers will often have autistic children, the paternal-age factor may have more to do with the fact that autistic men can take a lot longer than NTs to figure out how to have a viable long-term relationship.

So if I'm reading that right, it seems problematic. A correlation with paternal age could be too weak to be statistically significant in its own right, but still strong enough to render the correlation with methylation insignificant.