[Hank]

Quote:

I’d say the jury is out on the relationship between paternal age and child psychiatric problems. Yes, there is some possibility that it matters. But it’s probably not necessary to run off to the sperm freezer just yet.

And the feminists wept.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-...any-worse/

[Cr33pin]

Are Older Men’s Sperm Really Any Worse? It all taste the same to me

[bacon]

But unlike freezing eggs it's a very cheap and easy option for men. So if a guy knows in his 20s he wants to wait til he is 50 before he has kids he is looking at a few trips/deposits to the sperm bank at a few hundred dollars each and an annual storage fee of another couple hundred dollars a year. It's maybe 1 /100 the cost and difficulty that women go through when freezing their eggs.

[tattiemasher]

I've seen a few articles out now suggesting older men's sperm isn't any worse than that of a young man, but then I'd be more inclined to believe that it's not just age, but also physical condition that plays a part. There's more overweight and unfit 50 year olds than 20 year olds...it would be far more interesting to make comparisons with older men who are still in decent shape, eat right, healthy lifestyle etc.

[The Beast1]

This entire debate is pointless.

Lets take two individuals in their mid 60s. One male, one female.

Lets take two individuals in their early 20s. One female, one male.

Let the old man have the young female and the young male have the old female. The object of this is to attempt to create a child.

Which one of these combinations will produce a child?

No matter what anyone says, a woman post menapause cannot have children period.

Trying to argue whether or not the age of a father affects the child's likelihood of defects is pointless when the woman cannot even spit a child out. A woman post menapause is effectively obsolete in nature's eyes when it comes to birth. This alone is enough of a point to win this stupid debate.

[Excelsior]

Quote:

Let’s consider fertility first. You might think that it would be easy to figure out how sperm quality declines by comparing pregnancy rates for the partners of older and younger men. And, in fact, some scientific papers do this. But they have a central problem: Older men tend to be matched with older women. And since we know female fertility declines with age, it’s hard to figure out whether male age has any additional effect. This study in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology is a good example of a case where older men appear to have lower fertility, but the effect is impossible to detect when you also adjust for partner age.

It turns out this problem is surmountable with a simple trick: Observe cases where couples are using donor eggs. There’s no reason that the age of the egg donor would be related to the age of the father (indeed, in the data it typically is not) which means you can examine the impact of the father’s age independent of the mother’s.

Studies that do this — here is one nice review in the journal Fertility and Sterility — tend to find that while semen volume (and, hence, sperm count) does decline with age, there is little overall impact on reproductive success (the ability of the sperm to penetrate the egg, fertilize it, etc.).