Here we tell you and if having children after that age is dangerous for them.
When it comes to procreation, men do not have an expiration date. For example: rocker Mick Jagger just had his eighth child at the age of 73.
Because men are not menopausal (the period in women’s lives when fertility ends), you can continue to have children at advanced ages.
And more and more men are choosing to do it.
According to the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC), the average age of first-time parents is around 25 years.
However, between 1980 and 2014, there was a 58 percent increase in the number of men age 35 and older who brought home a new baby.
In most cases, this increase in age is not something to be concerned about. Most of these older dads do not have fertility problems, and have their babies without physical or developmental problems, explains Dr. Robert E. Brannigan, urologist and specialist in male reproductive medicine at the Feinberg School of Medicine at the University Northwestern.
But, this does not mean that delaying parenthood is risk-free.
AGING CARRIES PROBLEMS IN THE PRODUCTION LINE OF YOUR SPERM
Women are born with all the eggs they will need. Men, on the other hand, are literally sperm factories.
You produce about a thousand swimmers every time your heart beats, says Dr. Bradley Anawalt, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington and a spokesman for the Endocrine Society.
The vast majority never fertilize an egg – they are expelled through ejaculation or discarded by your body once its lifespan ends.
But after age 30, part of your machinery begins to cause problems, says Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy, director of medicine and male reproductive surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.
You can blame things like exposure to radiation, toxins in the environment, and simple aging.
As you age and these factors come together, you lose your Leydig cells (the cells in your testicles that make testosterone) and Sertoli sustain cells, which nourish the new sperm, says Dr. Brannigan.
As a result, your body begins to expel faulty sperm, carriers of DNA mutations that can harm your future babies.
According to a study published in Nature, the average 30-year-old father transmits 55 mutations to his offspring. However, for every year you age after this age , you have to add two mutations.
This means that every 16.5 years, the number of mutations you would pass on to your offspring will double. And, after 50 years, let’s say at the age of 80, you would pass 8 times the number of mutations that if you had it at 30.
SO, ACTUALLY, HOW RISKFUL IS OLDER PARENTING?
Of course, not all of these mutations cause health problems.
But some contribute to having problems conceiving or fulfilling the entire period of pregnancy, says Dr. Ramasamy.
For example, a UK study found that men over the age of 35 were 50 percent less likely to conceive after a year of trying compared to men over 25.
Another study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that women with partners age 35 and older were 27 percent more likely to have abortions than those with partners age 25 and younger.
This regardless of the mother’s age, a factor that also increases the risk of complications, since the quality and number of eggs of women decrease with age.
There are other mutations that do not affect the conception or development of the fetus, but can cause birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities or other genetic diseases in children, explains Dr. Ramasamy.
In a review by the Baylor College of Medicine, the researchers indicated that there are 86 congenital problems linked to late parenthood.
They concluded that the risk of having any of these problems in the general population is 1 in 50, while in babies, of parents aged 40 or over, it is 1 in 42.
Specifically, the child’s risk of achondroplasia – a type of dwarfism – increases from 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 1,923, once men reach 50 years of age.
Additionally, the autism rate increases from 1 in a thousand to 1 in 174 in children whose parents are over the age of 40.
Unfortunately, the cancer rate of his offspring also increases with the father’s age, possibly due to the same DNA mutations.
For example, women’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is 1 in 8, but increases by 1 in 5.3 if their father was over the age of 40 when he was born, according to Baylor’s review.
In the general population, the risk of suffering from leukemia is 1 in 36 thousand children, however, it increases to 1 in 21 thousand 302 in children whose parents were 40 years of age or older at birth.
WHAT SHOULD AN OLD FATHER DO?
The numbers are terrifying, but it is important to say that most? Old dads? They have healthy children, says Dr. Brannigan.
In fact, it is the age of the mother that plays a much more important role in the baby’s health (that is why women 35 years of age and older receive more careful monitoring during pregnancy).
Doctors claim that there is an acceptance of parental contributions today, yet much remains to be learned.
It is more difficult to study because, unlike mothers, who are obviously present at the time of delivery, the ages of the fathers are not always taken into account. So researchers don’t have that much data to analyze.
Furthermore, not even the researchers focused on the subject agree on what qualifies as one? old paternal advanced ?, said Dr. Brannigan.
This means that the doctors who are responsible for men’s reproductive health do not have an “advanced parental age” standard. Furthermore, there is no study to assess the risk of having a child in these conditions.
Currently, doctors can scan your sperm for DNA mutations. But they destroy it in the process, so you won’t have any assurance that the result matches your next production, explains Dr. Ramasamy.
Couples who are concerned about this can try IVF and use a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, whereby the embryo is tested for genetic diseases before it is implanted in the womb.
However, Dr. Ramasamy says that in the next five to 10 years, it will be possible to carry out genetic tests on your sperm to determine if it can cause problems.
If you’re an older adult and want a child , you can speak to a genetic counselor who specializes specifically in reproductive problems, suggests Dr. Brannigan.