Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders

New submitter optimus_phil writes "New Scientist magazine reports on findings that suggest that delaying fatherhood may increase the risk of fathering children with disorders such as Apert syndrome, autism and schizophrenia. The article reports that 'although there is a big increase in risk for many disorders, it's a big increase in a very small risk. A 40-year-old is about 50 per cent more likely to father an autistic child than a 20-year-old is, for instance, but the overall risk is only about 1 per cent to start with.'"

Comments

In other news..

[AlanS2002]

You have a 100% chance of dying over time.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Coward]

But consider what potential your children might have. For all you know, you could father a genius who brings peace and harmony to the world. Or you could father the greatest genocidal maniac of all time who finally puts the world out of its misery.

Re:In other news..

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I have a somewhat more optimistic view of the future than you seem to -- I do think we're heading for a low point in some areas right now, but I also think these things often go in cycles and that since most people are basically decent human beings we will learn to deal with the problems and fix them with time. There will be more later, but that's life.

Personally, I wonder how much the kinds of health effects we're discussing here make a difference compared to the potential benefits of having parents who are a bit older. For example, if older parents tend to be more financially secure, they can probably afford a better home in a safer neighbourhood and a safer model of car. Maybe they can afford better educational toys or more books or to take their children to more places and given them more positive experiences as they grow up. More mature and experienced parents can also share the benefits of that experience with their children, perhaps giving the kids a head start in academic life or more emotional support when they have to deal with difficult situations.

There's got to be some sort of balance here. Very young parents don't tend to do well by their kids, because they can't. Maybe they lack sufficient resources to care for them properly, and maybe they are still barely more than children themselves emotionally. On the other hand, relatively old parents tend to have kids with more health problems as we've been discussing, and obviously at some point in your life you can no longer mother a new child at all. The interesting thing to me is how to figure out what gives kids the best outcomes under different circumstances, so would-be parents can make informed decisions based on seeing the whole picture.

Re:In other news..

[hcs_$reboot]

In other news, Children with older fathers and grandfathers 'live longer' And quote:

It might be possible that the advantage of receiving long telomeres from an old father is more than offset by the disadvantage of higher levels of general DNA damage and mutations in sperm

Re:In other news..

[ShanghaiBill]

Speaking of medicine, how much of that risk increase is due to the advanced age of the father, and how much is related to the extra medical procedures he was subjected to ?

And how much of it is because Aspies have difficulty with relationships, and get married later in life, after both their social skills and finances have improved? The correlation may be backwards. It may not be older fathers creating autism, but autism creating older fathers.

disclaimer: I got married when I was 43.

Re:In other news..

[scarboni888]

The unborn are in a place of peace. Who are we to disturb that?

Every year 2,000,000 people on this planet commit suicide and untold others make the attempt.

Why bother taking the chance of subjecting some poor unfortunate soul to what amounts to misery and suffering? What gives you the right, especially in a day and age when effective and safe sterilization methods exist?

Because it was done to you, maybe? I would hope not.

Every day millions of unfertilized eggs get flushed down the toilets. There's nothing sad about that now is there?

Re:In other news..

[scarboni888]

Well if you're a whackjob that believes in 'a destiny of sorts' then my rationale will never make it through your selfish shield of emotional appeal will it?

Fact of the matter is we're all born to die due to a runaway genetic program that, due to the second law of thermodynamics, is clearly a dead end road. It doesn't care about you and uses you only for it's insanely dead-end process of creating more robot producing genetic robots to no real purpose. Through programmed death it discards us as only so much used-up tissue paper so why should we have any more respect or reverence for it than it has for us? We toil and labour under the guaranteed threat of our own demise and for what? This insane loop that seeks to preserve itself in a perpetual birth, life, and death process that will, ultimately, in the heat death of the universe, amount to nothing anyway except for maybe all of the suffering it laid waste to along the way?

You can unthinkingly promote the subjucation of those who never needed to be subject to it in the first place if you like. I personally think a short circuiting of the entire process is far more (and pre-emptively) compassionate. That is all.

Re:In other news..

[AthanasiusKircher]

More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.

I used to think this way too. But I think the one thing that stands out as irrational in your argument is "today." What is so bad about "today"?

Go back a hundred years, and the chances of a lot of these things was significantly higher. Go back a few centuries, and most kids died in early childhood, many women died in childbirth, and most people who managed to get to adulthood faced much, much more harsh conditions than the vast majority of people would in an industrialized country would today.

So, if you want to have a pessimistic worldview, and you think that's a good reason not to have a child, that's fine. But just be honest with yourself and admit that -- by that logic -- the human race should have become extinct a long, long time ago. It has to do with your philosophy and beliefs, not some terrible conditions that are supposedly so much worse "today."

As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.

Life is neither a "gift," nor is it some sort of "punishment." It is simply life. Frankly, while I myself had thought the same thoughts in the past, I have since realized the hypocrisy that often comes with it. If so many things are so terrible in the world today, why not commit suicide right now? If life is "suffering" and having a child is only to bring a new life into a world of suffering, why do you yourself continue to exist?

And if your answer is simply, "Well, things are getting worse... so I'm still okay, but my child would have a terrible future," then please see above and read some history books. Miraculously, millions of those people in the past didn't commit suicide either, despite the horrendous suffering in their world -- and they even chose to bring more kids into it.

Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with people who decide not to have kids for whatever reason. I think fewer people probably should have them, since it's a significant responsibility, and people should think about it seriously. But try to be honest with yourself about what your motivations are.

(Otherwise, you end up going down the bizarre irrational path of philosophers, like David Benatar who advocate that the human race commit collective suicide (see Benatar's book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence), but the philosophers themselves -- despite horrendous suffering in the world, and their likely contribution to more of it every day -- somehow decide that they should themselves continue stay alive. Life really must not seem that bad to most people who make this argument, if they're still living in this world.)

correlation, causation, not the droids, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, maybe waiting until you're 40 to have a kid is a symptom of the genes responsible for these disorders.

Re:correlation, causation, not the droids, etc

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

More likely a sign of the effect of society on the decision of having a child: either the couple is poor and decides they can't offer the child a good life, or they're still student and they prefer to wait until they're done with their studies and have stable jobs and incomes... that sort of thing.

and the risks of marriage delays parenthood

[Anonymous Coward]

With a 50% divorce rate in the US, if you have children and you're the primary wage earner, it is likely you
1) Pay for kids that you only get to see 20% of the time
2) Pay your ex-spouse for his'/her's decision/ability to make less money than you do
3) Pay your ex-spouse's legal bills so that person can cause you as much pain as possible in court
I think it is a horrible deal.
And the legal system becomes the other person's weapon to abuse you.
Miss a payment, and you're screwed.
If you want children, donate your source code.
If you want to raise kids, date someone who has nice kids.

Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood

[Calydor]

Yes, because being locked into an unhappy and possibly abusive relationship for life is so much better.

If your spouse wants to drag you through hell in the legal system, what do you think it'll be like to be forced to keep on living with them?

Re:I was asked to pass on this note...

[Lord Kano]

Consider this alternative.

• Excellent choice. You had been scheduled to be the parents of the world's next Hitler but your decision to not procreate will spare untold misery and suffering.
  #Deity

Basically, some things in life are enormous responsibilities that you should face with your eyes open. If you think that you shouldn't have children or own a gun or fly a plane, you're probably right.

LK

Actually, Alois Schicklgruber was quite abusive

[IgnorantMotherFucker]

Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller devoted twenty years to treating the very worst kinds of child abuse, then decided to stop all treatment of actual patients in hopes of putting a permanent end to that child abuse by writing a great many profoundly insightful books.

Her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing And The Roots Of Violence has just four chapters. One of the chapters makes a pretty good case for Adolf Hitler, World War II, NAZI Germany and the Holocaust all being to the fact that Alois Schicklgruber beat the young Adolf Schicklgruber every single day of his young life.

One day when he was thirteen or so - I don't clearly recall when - Adolf stood stoically and calmly for his beating, then at the end of it, told his father how many times his father had hit him, thanked him then calmly walked away. Everyone who witnessed this thought Adolf had gone insane. Perhaps he had.

Most of Miller's books are hugely popular with mental health professionals. Powells always has a whole bunch of copies of each book on its shelves in Portland, Oregon.

Quite likely you can find For Your Own Good in any decent bookstore.

I expect they've been translated to many languages. I'm not sure but I think Miller's Mother Tongue was German. She spoke English, but not very well, so the English-language editions of her books are all translated by experts.

Actually, no

[dutchwhizzman]

Mortality has only been the case for about 90% of humans ever born. Statistically speaking, you have a 10% of living forever.

"Just" 1% ?

[cellocgw]

Personally I view a significant cogitative or social defect that has a one-percent chance of ocurring to be unacceptably high. That's several kids in each class year in any medium-sized elementary school.

So, yes, I would consider an increase from 1% to 1.5% to be important. Granted, reducing the base probability would be far more useful than dealing with the age-related increase, but either way, these are large numbers compared with, say the usual "cancer risk increases by 5x" headlines which ignore the base risk being maybe 1E-6.

Re:The Kid Bank

[sumdumass]

Screw that. I stored them so I can have clones made to harvest organs from as I age. I will likely live forever with the hopes of an entirely new body. And as soon as we can transplant a brain, 15 years later I will finally be able to get laid in high school.