Parental age and motor neuron disease.

A case-control approach was used to study the relationship between parental age and motor neuron disease (MND) in a nationally representative sample of men. [The method, involving a search for parents' records in the NHS Central Register, is new and may be of interest in other conditions where parental age is thought to play a part.] The parents of men who died of MND in 1979 were not older than the parents of sex, age and regionally standardised controls who died in the same year.