Health & Fitness - Kid bipolar disorder linked to older dads

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Kid bipolar disorder linked to older dads

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (UPI) -- Fathers who are older may be associated with an increased risk for their offspring to have bipolar disorder, Swedish researchers said.

Emma M. Frans of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues identified 13,428 patients in Swedish registers with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. For each one, they randomly selected from the registers five controls who were the same sex and born the same year but did not have bipolar disorder.

When comparing the two groups, the older an individual's father, the more likely he or she was to have bipolar disorder. After adjusting for the age of the mother, participants with fathers older than 29 years had an increased risk, Frans said.

The study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that the offspring of older mothers also had an increased risk, but it was less pronounced than the paternal effect. For early-onset bipolar disorder -- diagnosed before age 20 -- the effect of the father's age was much stronger and there was no association with the mother's age, Frans said.

Copyright 2008 by United Press International

This news arrived on: 09/02/2008

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