Older Fathers

Posted by Joanna Karpasea-Jones Apr 5, 2009

I'm not sure what I think of the latest Swedish research that shows a human egg can wind back the clock for a sperm at the moment of conception. If the researchers say this is possible, I am sure they are right, but is it foolproof?

Medical professionals and the public alike all seem to take for granted the fertile man's endless capacity for fathering children, but there are dozens of studies out there showing that children born to older fathers tend to have more health problems:

Lower IQ

A study in PLoS Medicine found that children born to older fathers, had less thinking skills than those born to younger fathers. It was a large study involving 33,000 children born between 1959 and 1966 and they had cognitive tests at 8 months old, 4 years old and 7 years old, exploring how well they could reason, concentrating, learning, reading, speaking and motor skills. The study was adjusted for other factors which could have impacted the results, such as parental income, and even after taking these into account, the children of older fathers still scored less.

The ages of the fathers studied were anything from 14 years to 66 years.

The study author said

"For the moment, our study suggests that paternal age, like maternal age, also should be 'on the radar screen."

(John McGrath, MD, PhD, professor, Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Harry Fisch, MD, director, Male Reproductive Center; director of urologic microsurgery, Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital).

Autism

Another study linked autism to older fathers. It was found that autism was six times more likely in children born to fathers over the age of 40, compared with those born to fathers under 30.

Rates for autism were: 6 in every 10,000 babies born to fathers aged between 15 and 29. This rose to 9 in every 10,000 if the father was aged between 30 and 39, and the rate shot up to 32 in every 10,000 if the father was aged between 40 and 49, and even higher if he was over 50. (Archives of General Psychiatry, September 2006).

Early Death

According to the European Journal of Epidemiology, a study has linked children of older fathers to early death and found that babies born to men older than 45, were 88% more likely to die than those born to men aged 25-29. 100,000 first born children were studied for 18 years and during this time, 831 died, the majority of them in the first year after birth.

Schizophrenia

A study by researchers at the New York University School of Medicine, found that children born to older fathers were more likely to have schizophrenia. Men aged over 45 were twice as likely to have children with this mental illness than men aged less than 25. For men over 50, the risk tripled.

So how does all of this fit with the egg reducing the age of the sperm? Maybe it's not an exact science after all.