Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders 192
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.'"
In other news.. (Score:4, Funny)
You have a 100% chance of dying over time.
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Not necessarily in a substantially more pleasant way of reaching that end.
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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 ? I would think a 50 year old father has underwent allot more CT scans, radiographs, MRIs, and has taken allot of genotoxic pills during his lifetime than a 30 year old father.
About 1% of US cancers are linked to CT scans and the strong magnetic field of the MRI was proven genotoxic in mice.
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Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Vitamin D deficiency from lack of outdoors time? (Score:2)
That all may well have some truth. Also, many decades ago, social roles and courtship procedures were more clearly defined (as "manners", and also religious systems). So, it may have been easier back then for Aspies to marry at a younger age with less unstructured social situations to navigate?
Still, another factor could be that vitamin D deficiency may also cause autism, and I wonder if older parents may spend less time outdoors in the sun and so have their young child outdoors less? Older skin also has mo
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It's impossible to correctly control for this type of "science". Luckily I snagged a hottie while we were both young, so the human race will have ample access to my excellent genetic material.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Ahhh.... so easy to take that gamble with *someone else's* life now isn't it?
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You mean as apposed to ending the life before it begins?
It is not someone else's life until such time it begins and can survive on it's own. At that point, it is not a gamble but destiny of sorts.
Re:In other news.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Well, that is if you are some sort of whackjob that thinks that which does not exist does exist. But then you would have to have some sort of doctrine or religion explaining the purpose of the existence before the existence and deviation from that doctrine or religion would be the only way you could say "Who are we to disturb that?".
And what is your poin
Re:In other news.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Here, read this [savageresearch.com].
You will feel better in a moment.
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Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at a French café, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He said to the waitress: âoeIâ(TM)d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.â The waitress replied: âoeIâ(TM)m sorry, Monsieur, but weâ(TM)re out of cream. How about with no milk?â
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I KNOW!
It was in text when I copied it... here' I'll fix it.
Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He said to the waitress: I'd like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream. The waitress replied: I'm sorry, Monsieur, but we're out of cream. How about with no milk?
It looks like the apostrophe's were not normal apostrophe's.
And this being slashdot, they can massively change the interface but are unable to let you edit your posts for even five minutes after
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Exactly my point. Once the life has began, it's no longer a gamble, it is what it is.
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No one said anything about abortion other then you.
Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I've heard it suggested that one of the major evolutionary advantages humanity has over other species is middle age. Most of us will have a significant period in our lives when we are no longer producing children but still able to work productively and to help younger people to develop.
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Yelling 'get off my lawn' is helpful?
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Yelling 'get off my lawn' is helpful?
What an egocentric view! You might as well know the truth...
"Human middle age" was invented by lawns to keep people off them. Not every evolutionary advantage targets humans as the beneficiary. ;)
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I'm not sure how effectively a complete separation would ever work, given the strength of parent-child bonding in humans. I do think you're on to something there, though.
I've sometimes wondered whether we've lost some useful structure relatively recently, as a side effect of the easy travel and communication over long distances we enjoy today. Having a local community or extended family where children are not only raised by their parents but also supported by others of their parents' generation, who collect
Re: In other news.. (Score:2)
The traditional way (Score:2)
The concept of older people raising the children of younger people is hardly anything new, in fact it's the way things have been done for much of human history, without any ugly parent-child separation via adoption. How? Easy. Children are raised primarily by their grandparents. It's only the modern shift in culture that expects young adults to stand on their own and carve their own path in the world that has disrupted this pattern. It's still somewhat common in some cultures though - American Hispanics
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Replace "older parents" with "grandparents" and you'll see that this already happens reasonably frequently by accident, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes. Making it more "normal" and "planned" (and thereby reducing the amount of stress experienced by the parties involved) might be worthwhile.
Re:The Kid Bank (Score:4, Funny)
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.
That was the case with my father (Score:2)
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com].
My father's part-time job during high schools was performing mineral assays for the Sierra Nevada, California gold mining industry, so he was accepted to study chemistry at UC Berkeley with wild enthusiasm, right out of high school at the age of eighteen.
Unfortunately he realized just before the last day to withdraw without any grades being recorded, that he'd blown off his entire first term of school by partying with the UCB marching band. He played the sax in
You brought a smile to my weary eyes. (Score:1)
But I should say, other than being well-taught by my father, it wasn't any kind of connection that got me into Caltech.
An ex-girlfriend of mine at Tech was from a deeply impoverished family. When her father broke the bad news that he could not pay her fees anymore, so she would have to leave Caltech, she burst into tears. Someone advised her to consult the financial aid office, who fixed her right up.
She went on to earn a PhD in Mathematics, and is now a cryptologist for the NSA. Sorry but I feel it woul
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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
News to me. If you're still behaving petulantly by your late teens, you have no one to blame but yourself (and maybe your parents, maybe because they were too old, ironically). Maybe that's because so many Americans are too busy focusing on being temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Where I live (not in the US), it is very common for people to marry and start families in their very early twenties and sometimes even late teens. There is no insurmountable financial strain to speak of, but that has more to
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If you're still behaving petulantly by your late teens, you have no one to blame but yourself
You're reading things into my comments that weren't there. I'm not talking about behaving like a 5 year old throwing a tantrum. I'm talking about things like teenage parents having little if any experience of living independently, managing budgets, planning their time, dealing with dramatic life events like losing a job or having someone close to them pass away, and so on. I'm talking about exhibiting poor judgement due to lack of experience, the same way that young drivers tend to have far more accidents a
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But on the bright side, it is unlikely that your negative views on continuing the human race will be passed onto another generation.
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Human being have never lived in a utopia. We've always had problems and we always will. And since we're incorrigibly ungrateful creatures, we never give ourselves credit for problems solved of ameliorated. So as far as we've been concerned the world's always been going to hell, and always will be.
We act as if having problems is an unnatural state of affairs, but we've always had problems and always will. And that's good, because you can't build a meaningful, satisfying life without problems to work on.
So d
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The same could well be said for the vast majority of human beings born at any given time in history. The position that we first-worlders hold today is pretty much unique in the quality and quantity of life and life's experiences. Look back at what even upper class people had to deal with throughout the last, say thousand years and rejoice at how easy we have it.
Certainly things could get worse. Things will get worse for a lot of people and your personal decision to have progeny is just that, but life has
Re:In other news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.)
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Re:I was asked to pass on this note... (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider this alternative.
#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
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If you think that you shouldn't have children or own a gun or fly a plane, you're probably right.
Same could be said for getting out of bed in the morning, driving a car, having sex, going to crowded public places, etc.
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But, some say the EU should be nuked from orbit.
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"But, some say the EU should be nuked from orbit."
Catalans, Basques, Scots etc who want their own little piece of Geography for some nostalgic reason or other.
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More because they feel they can manage their own land resources better than the Eurocrats in London or Brussels can.
As an example, have a look at the situation in Somerset and Devon. Eurocrats pay farmers to cut down trees and clear land, but those trees helped remove water from the ground. Then the Eurocrats fund a scheme to return the rivers to their natural state and create a bird sanctuary. But those rivers helped remove heavy rainfall from the ground. Result? Third world living conditions for thousands
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Re:In other news.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Actually, no (Score:4, Informative)
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Also, correlation != causation.
Is delayed fatherhood the cause, or is there an underlying root cause that also leads to delayed fatherhood.
In other words, are fathers who are statistically more likely to sire children with these problems also subject to behavioral or other biases that lead them to more often have children later in life?
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I like your style and your sig, AlanS2002!!!
Yeah, I know I rock.
correlation, causation, not the droids, etc (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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for most of recorded history, europe was the backwater of the world. it was only after the Turks finally destroyed the Eastern Roman Empire did the scientists and artists from there move to Europe to jump start the renassaince. only because the eastern peoples' governments screwed their countries at the time did europe get ahead
and the risks of marriage delays parenthood (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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One of those cases where you can't be sure if something is serious or sarcasm. I'm glad we at least agree.
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Just in case I didn't make it sufficiently clear, I was attempting sarcasm there. The 'good old days' weren't. Hence the heavy drinking and high levels of coercive violence.
Well, actually they were, on average and compared to the average now. By almost any measure you want.
Just because something seems counter intuitive to you doesn't make it not true.
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We need the sarcasm font to be made into a standard.
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Makes you wish for the good old days, when people didn't defer marriage because the social costs of doing so were overwhelmingly high, and divorce rates were low because they were hard to get...
You mean, the good old days when families actually were more stable, and tended to be happier?
No, don't throw me in the brier patch! Anything but that!
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because the social costs of doing so were overwhelmingly high
We can probably argue all day about which is 'better', but it's worth noting here that those social pressures may have evolved for a reason (at least for an evolutionary sense of 'reason') and that more modern social pressures (higher standard of living requiring higher earnings, government regulation of marriage, etc.) have genetic diseases as an outcome.
Giving individuals more choice in marriage arrangements may be the best thing we can do socie
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There are two reasons for that.
1: Feminism is reacting to the historical fact that it has usually been the reverse that was true. It is only contraceptives which have managed to change this.
2: This is compounded, and this is where it probably gets "too complex" for a lot of people, by the fact that this behavior IS inherently sexist. Of course, here a lot of people fail to understand that the famous "patriarchy", which feminists decry, is also sexist toward men.
Women, it says, are all harmless victims who c
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Court Says Craigslist Sperm Donor Must Pay Child Support [slashdot.org]. So that is not a real option. So if you are male, you are out of luck.
Gee, if only there were an entire industry designed around allowing men to donate their sperm while legally shielding them from responsibility for that donation.
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industry? it's a real estate thing, we have whole areas of major cities designed for that. the result is high enough percentage of children with no respect for life or property to make the whole area a high crime zone.
terrible social experiment with horrendous results
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Or, don't marry until you can tell the difference between an evil witch and a good hearted princess.
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not possible, it's a quantum mechanical cat in box question, marriage changes some princesses into witches
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Happened with my first wife, but upon later introspection, I had the information (even though it was masked), I just willfully chose to ignore it and go with wishful thinking that the witch within had the good sense to realize that the relationship wouldn't work in witch mode.
Wrong, I was. Better, I have learned. Not look so good when 900 years old, you are, I think.
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With a 50% divorce rate in the US, if you have children and you're the primary wage earner, it is likely you...
Or you could choose to take care of your marriage. Keeping a relationship strong is a lot of hard work, and requires a lot of sacrifice, but it can be done. Note that it's important that your spouse understand this and be willing going in to invest the effort required, but your willingness can and will affect your spouse's willingness.
Some specific recommendations, though this list is more descriptive than prescriptive. The specifics may vary; it's the attitude and intent that matters:
1. Keep the courts
So guys, don't delay that task. (Score:2)
Become a father at your earliest opportunity! Onset of puberty being optimal it appears.
Disclaimer - this is to be taken in a sarcastic vein.
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What are the paternity laws effects for minor fathers?
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Given that underage boys who were molested by women who subsequently got pregnant and forced the boys to pay child support upon reaching adulthood, pretty much the same as for adult fathers.
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Career women are making a habit of waking up one day and suddenly realizing they forgot to do something: have children while they still could.
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maybe that study just confirmed mentally challenged women are more likely to be careless sluts
There are also significant risks to old mothers. (Score:2)
So, if you are an older father, seeking to reduce their childs risks, simply pick an 18 year-old wife.
For the sake of the children.
http://pediatricbioscience.com... [pediatricbioscience.com]
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According to a Wikipedia article the "Average age difference between couples in developed world is between two to three years, with the female partner being younger". The article supporting this statement can be found here [cairn-int.info].
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FFS, adopt. Unless your genetics are so precious that they must be preserved, why would you want to fire that old cannon anyway?
Pre-U.S. Civil War President John Tyler (Score:2)
Which proves nothing, because this sort of discussion is not about proving things.
What I want to know about the research is how much dope the old coots under consideration did. I submit that the quality of life lived may have as much impact as the quantity, but not quite get teased out as well in the research.
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There are two living grandsons of John Tyler. Which proves nothing, because this sort of discussion is not about proving things. What I want to know about the research is how much dope the old coots under consideration did. I submit that the quality of life lived may have as much impact as the quantity, but not quite get teased out as well in the research.
This type of health research is largely about probability. It is not that far distant from research that shows that cigarette smoking is generally a really bad idea from a health perspective. You can't disprove that idea solely by showing a 70+ year old heavy smoker who managed to not get lung cancer, but you can support it by showing millions of people who died of it at a much younger age than that without a family history of it.
Similarly, we know that some conditions with poor outcomes track with t
Shorter d_r (Score:2)
"Just" 1% ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Screw these researchers... (Score:2)
...And the horse they rode in on. Some of us are having enough trouble dating women what with being a geek and all. Now they go and poke us with pointed sticks. Thanks for nothing, morons!
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there are women out there who like geeks. you just need to get yourself in situation/location where you meet more women.
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Clearly you misunderstand the nature of geekdom. ;-)
Our genetics are stupid (Score:2)
Older
Wiser
Better able to provide for offspring due to more career development
Higher likelihood of genetically fucked-up kids
Congratulations, DNA, you win the King of All Trolls prize.
..and the Great Cosmic Joke continues. Keep laughing, Universe.
1% risk is "very small?" (Score:2)
Actually, Alois Schicklgruber was quite abusive (Score:5, Informative)
Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller [alice-miller.com] 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 [powells.com] 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.
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He wasn't, he was quite coldly rational about what he wanted. He was an ordinary man, much like any other. Saying he was insane just cultivates the field for another like him to appear.
You must not have met many insane people (Score:2)
Plenty of them are coldly rational, yet completely unaware that they are floridly delusional.
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He was quite coldly rational about what he wanted? Really? I thought it was rather clearly established that his irrational actions contributed significantly to Germany losing in WW2.
And how does "X was insane" cultivate the field? Are you suggesting we view insanity as something desirable?
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His "irrational" actions resulted in Germany being the master of most of Europe, but nobody ever remembers that one.
By calling him insane we excuse anyone from examining how he came about. We fail to learn from history. "Oh, he was a madman, nothing to see there," is the attitude.
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why worry about passing "the problem" on to a kid? the kid will have the blessing not having to not ever worry about having a child until he chooses to use technology to have one. what's the problem?
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women more aged than taught youngins also make bad babies. downs syndrome, etc. i recommend pumping out babies at 25 or 30. your life might not be on track yet but if you're planning on babies, sacrifice one of the parents career for a few years.
You got knocked down to zero yet you have a very valid point.
An older woman has a huge chance of giving birth to a baby with downs syndrome; I found out in an adult manner. Dated an older woman who became pregnant and from then on that was the concern. Amniotic fluid was drawn and tested every month, her being a pro lifer I still wonder if one of the test registered positive.
I was also in my 40's and of course didn't know of this "Older dads' mutant sperm".
I was also working in a field where I was receiving