Posted on 06/25/2011 3:01:06 PM PDT by LucyT
Older fathers made headlines several years ago when researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported that a man over 40 is almost six times as likely as a man under 30 to father an autistic child.
Since then, research has shown that a man's chances of fathering offspring with schizophrenia double when he hits 40 and triple at age 50.
The incidence of bipolarity, epilepsy, prostate cancer and breast cancer also increases in children born to men approaching 40.
Both dwarfism and Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue) have been linked to older fathers, and according to research published in 1996 in the journal Nature Genetics, Apert syndrome (a disorder characterized by malformations of the skull, face, hands and feet) is a mutation caused exclusively by advanced paternal age.
A 2009 study at the University of Queensland, Australia, found a correlation between advanced paternal age and poorer performance by children on intelligence tests..."
And when researchers at King's College, London, bred mice from fathers of differing ages, the offspring of older fathers exhibited significant deficits in social and exploratory behavior.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
tell that to Mick Jagger.;)
Not sure I believe it. Certainly not my own experience with my younger children. I can’t help wondering if it isn’t another backdoor attempt to persuade more people not to have children.
yeah, right. A feminist’s wet-dream. Suuure..
Has anyone memo’d Hugh Hefner?
The future’s in trouble then, since both men and women are delaying having children - not just in the US and Europe but also in Asian nations as they become wealthier. A shame - people are living longer and don’t want to spend their twenties raising children. They also tend to be better parents with a little life experience.
That certainly explains “the outbreak of autism.”
It isn’t men, per se. It is women waiting to have the kids.
Men do and have done the same thing, for generations past and generations to come. They grow, they get a job they work until they die.
Women control the bio-clock. If a woman waits until her 40s (or 50s) to have kids, chances are good the man is also that old. And all the feminazi “you deserve it all” crap in the world can’t change biology.
Going to war against biology in order to create some wholly unnecessary and illusory appearance of “equality” is a losing proposition. Men pee standing up. Men are capapble of fathering children until the day they die. They’re physically stronger. But, they cannot bear children. Stop treating child bearing as some sort of burden or punishment and recognize it for the miracle and the great position of trust and responsibility that it is, and the invented “problem” goes away.
I agree.
I wanted to have my kids when I was young enough to have healthy ones. Glad I did. I was 30 when the youngest was born. Hubby was 38. Both kids healthy. And I could keep up with them too. I didn’t know that the father’s age was such a factor.
Now I’m looking forward to the next stage. Grandma. I’ll get to love them and spoil them, then give them back.
It’s not that great a factor, if you look at the statistical rate of occurrence. It’s equality-seeking. Women have a biological clock, therefore men have got to have one, sort of like those pitiful Europeans attempting to legislate men sitting down to pee.
There’s a history in my paternal line of fathering children later in life. My father was in his late thirties when he fathered me, my grandfather in his late fifties when he fathered my father and so forth on back to colonial times. There were practical reasons to delay starting a family in the past. Amassing enough land, saving enough money to support them, that sort of thing. Not anywhere near everybody was the descendant of a firstborn son with inherited wealth and land. This primogeniture drove migration as well as encouraging starting a family late. If your family goes back to the frontier era or colonial times, give it a look and you’ll see what I’m saying.
On the upside, delaying the fathering of children will have positive effect on longevity, as will delaying childbirth among women. It’s not all one big negative filled with genetic disorders and birth defects. There are plusses just as there are minuses, and we’ve seen this played out on both ends of the scale even in the mere four centuries of Eurpean settlement on this continent.
As far as any effects of delayed fatherhood, I’m not lacking in the IQ department and have no genetic disorders or deformities at all. This story is exaggeration of what is basically insignificant, statistically speaking, in order to make men appear to have a biological clock just as women do. Forced equality.
I don’t see how they would eliminate the consideration that most of the older males in the study were married to older wives. I’d have to see a whole lot more analysis of these findings before concluding that it’s probably just more feminist political correctness run amok.
Haven’t heard that about the Europeeeeans wanting to control how a man urinates. Is this recent? Can you provide more info on this? I’d like to read about this inane effort. Who is it, the French?
Somehow from the title, I was pretty sure the author was female. :D
Switzerland, I believe.
There hasn’t been an outbreak of autism.
There has been an outbreak of autism diagnoses, however, for purely financial purposes. Schools get more funding and more Medicaid and SSI funds can be handed out.
...unless they’re liberal billionaires, of course.
Idiocracy is our future. Can’t have older white male professionals raising their kids.
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