Father’s Age & Baby’s Health More Linked Than Believed

The authors of a new study analyzed video records capturing the development of more than 3,500 embryos.

American scientists have found that the embryos obtained from the spermatozoa of older men develop more slowly than the embryos from the cells of young men. The study presented at the annual conference of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (San Antonio, Texas), drew the attention of the Daily Mail.

On average, the embryos from the spermatozoa of the men aged 50+ years develop 35% slower than the embryos obtained from the sex cells of the men younger than 35 years. In particular, such an embryo needs more time to reach the stage of the blastocyst, that is the state when the embryo is attached to the wall of the uterus. On average, the blastocyst stage in the embryos from adult males takes 4.3 percent more time to happen than in the embryos from young men.

The authors came to such conclusions after analyzing the video recordings, which show the development of 3,532 embryos taken from 527 heterosexual couples.

The publication gives examples of other studies presented at the conference and devoted to the influence of the man’s age on the quality of his spermatozoa. One of these studies suggests that there are too many mutations accumulated in the reproductive cells of an adult male, while another study reports that the sperm cells of elderly men contain an excess of aneuploidic germ cells (where the normal number of chromosomes is disrupted).

Elderly people and their partners should think about the risks of poor pregnancy outcome and the potential problems of development of the baby’s nervous system.