Paternal age effect
Health effects of an older father at conception / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The paternal age effect is the statistical relationship between the father's age at conception and biological effects on the child.[1] Such effects can relate to birthweight, congenital disorders, life expectancy and psychological outcomes.[2] A 2017 review found that while severe health effects are associated with higher paternal age, the total increase in problems caused by paternal age is low.[3] Average paternal age at birth reached a low point between 1960 and 1980 in many countries and has been increasing since then, but has not reached historically unprecedented levels.[4] The rise in paternal age is not seen as a major public health concern.[3]
This article needs more reliable medical references for verification or relies too heavily on primary sources. (May 2015) |
The genetic quality of sperm, as well as its volume and motility, may decrease with age,[5][6] leading the population geneticist James F. Crow to claim that the "greatest mutational health hazard to the human genome is fertile older males".[7]
The paternal age effect was first proposed implicitly by physician Wilhelm Weinberg in 1912[8] and explicitly by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose in 1955.[9] DNA-based research started more recently, in 1998, in the context of paternity testing.