According to research published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, children born to unusually younger or unusually older parents have a higher risk of developing bipolar disorder in their adult years.
More precisely, the study presented at the ECNP Congress in Vienna, says that this is the case for people whose parents were under the age of 20 when they conceived them or over the age of 35 for the mother and over the age of 45 for the father.
This is known as a “U-shaped curve” due to the fact that it presents a tendency to manifest an increased risk with both younger and older parents.
As you may or may not know, bipolar disorder causes extreme mood swings in patients, from elation to severe depression.
It is one of the most serious common mental illnesses, affecting about 2 percent of all people.
It also comes with quite a high risk of suicide and early death.
Furthermore, it has a high heritability chance, meaning that there is a 15 to 30 percent chance the children have it later on in life as well if one of their parents is bipolar.
As for the new study, Dr. Giovanna Fico, the study’s leader stated that “Parental age is a factor which affects many conditions, such as fertility and some neuropsychiatric disorders. What we have found is slightly unusual because both younger and older parents carry an increased risk of having a child with bipolar disorder. The increased risk is moderate, but real. We can speculate that younger parents may be affected by environmental factors, such as socio-economic problems, lack of support, but also stress or immunological factors, and that older parents may have genetic factors coming into play, but the truth is we don’t really know.”
The research team reviewed a number of other studies from all over the world, all of which looked into bipolar disorder and the illness’ relation to age.
No less than 13,424,760 participants were included, 217,089 of which had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
That’s how they learned that older fathers had more of a risk than all the other groups when it comes to having a child with bipolar disorder – 29 percent!
As for older mothers, their risk was higher by 20 percent when compared to mothers between the ages of 25 to 29.
In younger parents (under the age of 20) the increased odds were 23 percent for young mothers and 29 percent for young fathers.
