Maternal Age and Parental Loss

Abstract

Maternal age at parturition, birth order, and parental loss have all been extensively investigated as possible causal or concomitant factors in a wide variety of mental disorders. Thus, to take an extreme example, the influence of maternal age on one of the two main kinds of mongolism is well known and can hardly have other than a biological explanation, as is also true of a number of other causes of mental defect whose incidence is known to increase with maternal age (Penrose, 1963); and similarly much is now known of the biological effects of maternal age in animals (for a survey see Parsons, 1964).