As several older Hollywood actors, including Al Pacino, 83, and Robert De Niro, 79, announce they are becoming fathers, health experts warn that older fathers may potentially pose a health risk to their kids.
Despite the low likelihood, a study in the international journal of midlife health Maturitas suggested that children of men over the age of 45 could have “birth defects” and “childhood autism.”.
Since the time of the Bible, older men have given birth. It’s an old phenomenon. What we didn’t realize was that they might be resulting in children who are more likely to have issues, said Arthur Caplan, a professor of medical ethics at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, to NBC News.
According to a different study that was published in the National Library of Medicine, the older a father is, the more likely it is that his children will have congenital conditions like heart defects and mental health conditions like autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, low IQ, and ADHD.
According to the study, men also lose fertility as they age, just like women do. However, while older men struggle to produce “quality” sperm, which could result in genetic abnormalities in the fetus, older women struggle with issues that affect ovulation. As a result of these mutations, the child may eventually develop cancers like breast cancer and a typical form of childhood leukemia.
Dr. “Men should be aware that they, too, go through the same reproductive aging cycle as women, despite the fact that they don’t have menopause,” Gloria Bachmann, associate dean for women’s health at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, told NBC News. ”.
Women who are expecting babies may also be impacted by this.
According to the Maturitas study, women who are expecting the child may be more likely to develop pregnancy complications like gestational diabetes, intrauterine growth restriction, and an increased risk of the baby being born prematurely.
According to Dr. Michael Eisenberg of Stanford University School of Medicine, “the absolute risk does remain relatively low.”. “It might not mean as much to a particular person. However, if we examine societal changes where parents are aging, then there may be a measurable rise in some of these disorders on a population level. ”.
He told the publication that, on average, men experience two mutations in their sperm DNA each year, which accounts for the age-related increase in the likelihood that their offspring will have a genetic disorder.
The news that Pacino was expecting his first child with girlfriend Noor Alfallah and fourth child overall was confirmed by PEOPLE on Thursday. Gia Virginia Chen De Niro, a girl, was the seventh child born to De Niro and girlfriend Tiffany Chen, who made the announcement in a sit-down interview with ET Canada last week.
