Accidental Blogger

Some time ago I had posted an article on the possible correlation between paternal age and increased risk of autism among the progeny. In the comments section readers brought up other disorders which too some suspect, are related to the age of the father.  Reader Leslie has requested that I bring this topic to the front of the blog once more. She sent me the link to another more recent article from the Irish Times which makes similar claims regarding older fathers.

FERTILITY EXPERTS have warned there is a growing body of evidence showing that the man’s age is a significant factor affecting the chances of a couple conceiving and of having a healthy child.

A new study presented last week at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Barcelona found that miscarriage rates increased significantly when the man was older than 35, and that pregnancy rates dropped when the man was older than 40. The study was based on more than 12,000 couples attending a fertility clinic in Paris.

Professor of reproductive medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, Sheena Lewis, who also presented a paper at the conference, said the Paris study "provided more data to add to an emerging picture" relating to the significance of the age of the father.

She said people needed to realise that they are taking a risk by waiting until they were 35 years or older to have children – as an increasing number of women and men are. "You cannot assume that it will happen, that it will not be a problem," she said.

Prof Lewis, who is a scientist at the Regional Fertility Centre at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, said there was a growing trend of people leaving it later to have children when their careers were established, and of people trying to start second families later in life. She said the clinic was seeing an increasing number of men in their 40s and 50s who wanted to have children, often in a second relationship…..

She said there were now quite a number of studies showing that as a man ages, the likelihood of his sperm being damaged increases. "A sperm is a very specialised little cell – it is just DNA with a tail and it has one single function, to get the DNA to the egg to fertilise it. In order to do that, the cell gets rid of everything but DNA, so it gets rid of repair mechanisms that you find in other cells. So if it gets damaged it can’t repair itself."