Mice born to older males with mutations in PAX6 — a gene involved in brain development — vocalize less than those with younger dads. The unpublished findings, presented today at the 2014 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., suggest how genes and paternal age can work together to trigger symptoms.
Tag: paternal age
The Sperm Whisperer
Young whippersnappers tap iPads while old men work sudoku puzzles, shifting uneasily in their seats.Orthopedic footwear mingles with hipster skinny jeans as a battle of bifocals and vanity glasses unfolds in a Murray Hill waiting room.
The mood is anxious as men both vernal and venerable wait to see urologist and superstar sperm doc Joseph Alukal.
Until three months ago, things were status quo for the 37-year-old fertility phenom, who typically addresses issues like performance anxiety, cancer and sexual dysfunction.
But a recent landmark study in the science journal Nature, linking advanced paternal age with higher incidents of autism and other maladies in offspring, has sent young New York men into a tailspin. And their little swimmers straight to Alukal’s test tubes.
“People keep asking me, ‘Doc, should I freeze my sperm? What if I meet the right girl 10 or 15 years from now?'” says Dr. Alukal, director of male reproductive health at NYU Langone Medical Center.
“It’s absolutely something I’m seeing more of in my office.”
Nearly two dozen men have come in since the research came out, and “more than 50 percent of the guys who come to me actually do it,” he says. Read full article.
Father’s Age Linked to Autism and Schizophrenia
Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age, scientists reported on Wednesday, in the first study to quantify the effect as it builds each year. The age of mothers had no bearing on the risk for these disorders, the study found.
Experts said that the finding was hardly reason to forgo fatherhood later in life, though it might have some influence on reproductive decisions. The overall risk to a man in his 40s or older is in the range of 2 percent, at most, and there are other contributing biological factors that are entirely unknown.
But the study, published online in the journal Nature, provides support for the argument that the surging rate of autism diagnoses over recent decades is attributable in part to the increasing average age of fathers, which could account for as many as 20 to 30 percent of cases.
The findings also counter the longstanding assumption that the age of the mother is the most important factor in determining the odds of a child having developmental problems. The risk of chromosomal abnormalities, likeDown syndrome, increases for older mothers, but when it comes to some complex developmental and psychiatric problems, the lion’s share of the genetic risk originates in the sperm, not the egg, the study found. Read full article.