Paternal Age Effect: How Old is Too Old?: SPERM DONORS CUT-OFF AGE IS 35TH BIRTHDAY AT THIS CRYOBANK, S. AFRICAN BANK CUT-OFF 30TH BIRTHDAY, ARE THEY AWARE ?

Thursday, May 17, 2007

SPERM DONORS CUT-OFF AGE IS 35TH BIRTHDAY AT THIS CRYOBANK, S. AFRICAN BANK CUT-OFF 30TH BIRTHDAY, ARE THEY AWARE ?

Donor Standards

Our donors are recruited from the Northwest US. Most of our donors are either starting, currently involved with, or have finished their higher education at the time of their participation in our donor program. All donors are between 18 and 35 years of age in order to minimize age related genetic abnormalities. All donors are frozen in very limited quantities in order to guarantee that the number of pregnancies created from any one donor are limited. We stop further sales to new clients at 10 reported successes. Although all donor histories are reviewed to provide you with donors that should give you a great chance of concieving a healthy and normal baby, there is of course no way to guarantee such an outcome. As all donor family histories will present with their own unique positive and negative attributes, we encourage all clients to review donor information thoroughly prior to purchase and use of specimens.

.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MORE SCHIZOPHRENIA IN OFFSPRING AT 35 AND ABOVE IS FOUND IN ALL STUDIES

1: Eur Psychiatry. 2007 Jan;22(1):22-6. Epub 2006 Dec 4. Links
Paternal ages below or above 35 years old are associated with a different risk of schizophrenia in the offspring.Wohl M, Gorwood P.
INSERM U675, 16 rue Henri Huchard 75018 Paris, France.
BACKGROUND: A link between older age of fatherhood and an increased risk of schizophrenia was detected in 1958. Since then, 10 studies attempted to replicate this result with different methods, on samples with different origins, using different age classes. Defining a cut-off at which the risk is significantly increased in the offspring could have an important impact on public health. METHODS: A meta-analysis (Meta Win) was performed, assessing the mean effect size for each age class, taking into account the difference in age class references, and the study design. RESULTS: An increased risk is detected when paternal age is below 20 (compared to 20-24), over 35 (compared to below 35), 39 (compared to less than 30), and 54 years old (compared to less than 25). Interestingly, 35 years appears nevertheless to be the lowest cut-off where the OR is always above 1, whatever the age class reference, and the smallest value where offspring of fathers below or above this age have a significantly different risk of schizophrenia. CONCLUSION: No threshold can be precisely defined, but convergent elements indicate ages below or above 35 years. Using homogeneous age ranges in future studies could help to clarify a precise threshold.

Labels: sperm donor cut-off 30, sperm donor cut-off 35

2 Comments:

At 2:01 PM , Daddy G. said...: Concerned Heart,

I don't think most men are aware, at least not younger men who will ultimately be responsible for that decision. I posted a story on Digg about a trend for younger women freezing their eggs in anticipation of having children later on. I posed the question about whether men should consider doing the same thing, and I got this response:

"Dude, men have an infinite number of sperm and keep producing them until the day they die, unless they are already infertile. Women, on the other hand, have a finite number of eggs and generally stop producing them when they are in their late 40's to 50's. This is menopause. Therefore, it makes sense for women to freeze their eggs to use when they stop producing more and no sense for you to bother asking the question you posed."
At 2:26 PM , concerned heart said...: Dear Daddy G.

You are so right that men are not aware that there is any change in sperm with age. There has been terrific education in this country to deny the reality of the male biological clock. It is similiar to the denial of global warming even though glaciers everywhere are melting. Only with courageous journalists like David Halberstam willing to write about the what does happen to sperm making cells DNA with advancing age could there be any change in consciousness. Sperm are eternally fresh and women's eggs get old. Everyone knows that.

I am working on getting the real scoop on sperm cryopreservation from an expert in the field. It seems that there are some risks with the freezing chemical. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading the blog so thoroughly. What is really interesting is that scientists now have have the technology to see the copy number variations that probably increase in sperm making cells and sperm with a man's age. Not that it would be profitable to prevent disease and disorders by publicizing this information. I don't know if anyone has looked at the sperm of the fathers of the autistic children in Sebat and Wiggler's study at Cold Spring Harbor Labs. Again it won't be profitable to find out that it is really the age of the father that increases disease causing copy number variation in sperm DNA. So it is a very tough sell for me. In fact the stronger, most competant, compassionate men are the ones that get it right away and they are less likely to have very damaged kids because they are starting out at a very healthy level.