Sperm Quality Declines With Age By Shawn Radcliffe Men's Fitness
If you tend to put off today what you can do tomorrow, you might
want to rethink that strategy when it comes to having kids. A
study in Iceland found that children of older fathers had more
genetic mutations. In fact, 97 percent of these mutations came
from older fathers. The risk was directly related to the age of
the father—a 36-year-old man would pass on twice as many
mutations as a twenty year old, with even more mutations from a
70-year-old. Unlike women, who are born with a fixed number of
egg cells, men continually produce sperm throughout their
lifetime. As men age, the number of errors in the DNA in their
sperm increases. These mutations can then be passed onto their
children. Not all of these genetic changes are harmful, but
researchers identified several that were linked to diseases like
autism and schizophrenia. The results of this study, published
in the journal Nature, matches previous research that found that
the chance of a child