Girls, do you want healthy children? Marry respectable men!

Older fathers have healthier offspring
Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, The Independent, 7 February 2008
Translation: Inopressa

It may be better for a young woman to have children with an older man: according to a new study, he has a better chance of producing healthy children than a young man with raging hormones.

A large-scale study of the question of how the age of parents affects the likelihood of a child having problems at birth has revealed that those babies whose fathers have not yet turned twenty are most at risk. Children of young fathers are 22% more likely to die in the first four weeks of life, and their chances of dying in the first year of life are 41% higher than those whose fathers are over twenty. In addition, they are 17% more likely to be born prematurely and underweight. At the same time, if a man is over forty, the risk of congenital diseases in a child does not increase.

The age of all mothers who participated in the study ranged from 20 to 29 years to exclude the influence of the mother's age on the results. The results of the work are published in the medical journal Human Reproduction.

Professor Shi Wu Wen of the Health Research Institute in Ottawa, Canada, who led the team of scientists, says that the findings are of great value. "Although the risk increases slightly in most individual cases, it is huge for society as a whole if the increase in danger we have detected is really related to the age of the father."

It is likely, however, that social factors also play a role. Teenage fathers are in most cases poorer than men over forty, they have a worse education, they are less likely to provide their pregnant wives with medical care that would allow them to avoid problems with the child.

Alan Pacey, a lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield, says: "It's easy to say that it's the sperm of a young father, as if they are abnormal in some way. But this is contradicted by the data of many studies that have shown that the number of defects in the DNA of germ cells in men increases with age. A much more convincing explanation is that older men simply have more opportunities to support their pregnant wives than younger ones. Apparently, the children of older fathers begin life in more favorable starting conditions."

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru07.02.2008