Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchParental Age and the Risk of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Nationwide, Population-Based Cohort Study
Section snippets
Study Design
This study is based on the Finnish Prenatal study of ADHD (FIPS-ADHD). It is a nested case-control study derived from all singleton live births in Finland between January 1, 1991 and December 31, 2005 (N = 900,603) (Figure 1). The total number of participants includes all those diagnosed with ADHD, identified from the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register (FHDR) between January 1, 1995, and December 31, 2011. The controls were selected randomly from the remainder of the national cohort who were
Results
Table 2 shows the paternal and maternal age distribution for participants with ADHD and controls. The paternal age among those with ADHD ranged from 16 to 67 years (mean = 30.6 years, SD = 6.5 years). Maternal age ranged from 14 to 47 years (mean = 27.8 years, SD = 5.7 years). As shown in Table 1, all of the potential confounders were significantly associated with both paternal and maternal age among controls as well as with ADHD. Parental ADHD was associated with having children at an earlier
Discussion
Young parental age was associated with an increased risk of ADHD. Fathers and mothers younger than 20 years had the highest risk of having an offspring with ADHD. However, offspring of mothers older than 30 years had a decreased risk of ADHD. The finding of an increased risk of ADHD in offspring of young parents is in line with previous studies. An increased risk of ADHD has been seen in offspring with young mothers9, 15, 16 and fathers.9 Offspring with both parents younger than 20 years had a
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2021, Journal of Affective DisordersCitation Excerpt :Previous studies have provided good evidence that young, as well as advanced, parental age have been associated with several psychiatric disorders in offspring. Young parental age has been linked with offspring attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (Chudal et al., 2015), psychosis (Miller et al., 2011), bipolar disorder (Chudal et al., 2014) and substance use (McGrath et al., 2014). On the other hand, advanced parental age has been associated with psychosis (Miller et al., 2011; D'Onforio et al., 2014), autism (Hultman et al., 2011; Sandin et al., 2012; D'Onforio et al., 2014), bipolar disorder (Menezes et al., 2010; Chudal et al., 2014, D'Onforio et al., 2014) and suicide attempts (D'Onforio et al., 2014).
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2021, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Clinical guidance is available at the end of this article.
The study was supported by grants from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression Independent Investigator Award, USA (A.S.), the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, Finland (A.S.), and Academy of Finland (A.S.). The study was conducted at University of Turku, Finland.
Ms. Hinkka-Yli-Salomäki served as the statistical expert for this research.
Disclosure: Drs. Chudal, Joelsson, Gyllenberg, Lehti, Leivonen, Gissler, Sourander, and Ms. Hinkka-Yli-Salomäki report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.