A new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry reveals that men over 40 are six times more likely to father a child with autism than men aged 15 to 29.
Another study published in June 2006 out of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that sperm quality (manifested by DNA errors) deteriorates as a man gets older.
It seems as if men, too, have a biological clock.
Tags: autism, DNA, Lawrence-Livermore-National-Laboratory, sperm-quality
It a really good idea to freeze semen if you might want to father babies past 35. A man’s sperm making cells can mutate and suffer DNA damage with age. The ability to kill off damaged cells may stop working with increasing age. We need someone to fund more studies, the NIH isn’t interested at this point. There should be a public outcry to do more research on this. It is more important to prevent disease than to do stem cell research that has a small chance of helping people. The research on schizophrenia, autism, diabetes 1, cancers, MS, birth defects and increased risk of non-familial chronic diseases of all kinds needs to be made public and more research needs to be done. Where do “mysterious” genetic diseases with “unknown” causes come from? Could it be from mutations in the DNA of older father’s sperm? Probably yes. It seems that the genes in sperm that form the brain and nervous system are the most vulnerable to ageing. There is more Alzheimer’s in offspring of older father too. More mental retardation and epilepsy. Let’s not wait too long to father and freeze sperm in our mid 20s to early 30s if we might want to father later in life.