Association between Paternal Age at Birth Time and the Risk of Offspring Developing Schizophrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia is the Leading psychotic disorder. It is a severe disease that involves social and interpersonal relationship of affected person and cause severe loss of function; that why many researchers wanted to know its etiologic factors. In this research, we wanted to reveal the relationship of paternal age to schizophrenia. This cross-sectional study was done on 240 patients of schizophrenia and 400 control person without any psychiatric and organic disorders. The average of paternal age at birth in schizophrenic group was 33.9±8.4 years and that of control group was 32.7±8.3 years (P = 0.04). In this study we concluded that the average of paternal age birth in schizophrenic patients was significantly higher than age of control group. This significancy show that schizophrenia, at least in part, is related to new mutations that originate in male germ cells. And this result can change our strategies to find the genetically etiology of schizophrenia and shows that father,s age no loss than mother’s contributes variably to the risk of a suboptimal reproductive outcome.