Though a multitude of studies have examined how maternal age affects baby health for decades, scientists have only recently started to investigate if the father’s age matters. One study, published in the May 2017 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry(JAACAP), analyzed kids’ behaviors from early childhood through adolescence and found that the age of men at conception had a great effect on their child’s social skills.
In the study, researchers looked at data from more than 15,000 sets of twins in the UK, obtained from the Twins Early Development study (TEDs). The team focused on the developmental patterns of social skills and noted differences in areas of hyperactivity, emotionality, as well as conduct and peer problems. Then, separately, they compared whether paternal age had more of an influence than genetic and environmental factors.
Results showed that children born to fathers younger than 25 years old and older than 51 years old showed more prosocial behavior in early development, but there was a ceiling. By the time they reached adolescence, these kids had fallen behind their peers with middle-aged dads. This was true across the board for social behaviors but no other domain, even after researchers controlled for maternal age. Further genetic analysis revealed that social development was primarily driven by genetic factors, rather than environmental. Notably, those genetic effects became more significant as paternal age increased.
“Increased importance of genetic factors observed in the offspring of older, but not very young fathers, suggests that there could be different mechanisms behind the effects at these two extremes of paternal age,” Dr. Magdalena Janecka, lead author of the study, explained in a news release. “Although the resulting behavioral profiles in their offspring were similar, the causes could be vastly different.”
Of course, more research needs to be done to duplicate results and determine biological correlations. In doing more research, more insight into parental age and the potential risks associated with it should be gleaned.
