Dad’s Health Linked To Autism In His Kids

Listen up, dad: A study in Norway suggests that certain aspects of a father’s health can influence the chances that his kids are autistic. To reduce your kids’ risk, there’s one area of health to which you better pay particular attention.

That area is your weight. Researchers at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found that fathers who are so overweight that they can be classified as obese may run a significantly higher risk of having autistic kids.

Using data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study, the scientists looked at the health of more than 90,000 children. The researchers also examined data from the Norwegian Patient Registry and studies of children who suffered autism or Asperger’s syndrome. By the end of the research, the children were aged 4 to 13 years.

The data demonstrated that a mother’s obesity didn’t seem to affect that chance that her kids would have autism. But dad’s weight problem doubled the risk for autism and Asperger’s syndrome, compared to the offspring of father’s whose weight was normal.

“We were very surprised by these findings because we expected that maternal obesity would be the main risk factor for the development of ASD (autism spectrum diagnosis). It means that we have had too much focus on the mother and too little on the father. This probably reflects the fact that we have given greater focus to conditions in pregnancy, such as the growth environment for the foetus in the womb than both environmental and genetic factors before conception,” says researcher Pål Surén.

Carl Lowe

By Carl Lowe

has written about health, fitness and nutrition for a wide range of publications including Prevention Magazine, Self Magazine and Time-Life Books. The author of more than a dozen books, he has been gluten-free since 2007.

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