Tick tock, you don't stop: Men have a biological clock too

Healthy Living
Sunday, September 14, 2008

Tick tock, you don't stop: Men have a biological clock too

by Jessica Ashley, Shine staff, on Thu Sep 11, 2008 3:02pm PDT

Just about the time I think I'm happy not to even think about being pregnant for the next few years and that it's just fine to push snooze on my biological clock, I see one of those apple-cheeked babies peeking out from a thousand dollar stroller at Starbucks. And sigh...my heart melts, my ovaries flip and the inevitable tick-tick-tick drowns out the conversation and coffee-whirring around me.Ladies, I know many of you get this. And gentlemen, it seems your biological clocks may be just as wound up as mine.Research is increasingly showing that fertility is impacted by a man's age, not just a woman's age, eggs and body. If you are a woman with the big red "OVER 35" flag on your ob/gyn chart, you know that you've been well-warned and tested for your risk of conceiving a child with Down syndrome and other developmental issues. Studies of autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and Down syndrome now show that older fathers also carry that red flag of higher risk.This understanding is radical because it shifts the focus (and sometimes, the blame) of fertility. Because females are born with all the eggs they will have in their lifetime and men produce sperm every 90 days, the formula's told us that women's fertility is ever-decreasing while men's is always rejuvenating. Not so, science now says. In fact, the quantity sperm may be produced every three months but the quality of the sperm does go down as men get older. While there are certainly elderly men actively making babies, some studies have shown that it takes 8% of couples more than a year to conceive when the father is 25 or younger, but 15% of couples (almost double the rate of infertility challenge) when the father is 35 or older.I was also fascinated to read that one French study reports that, among couples seeking fertility treatment, each parent's age has equal impact on pregnancy and miscarriage. This means that the older the parent -- male or female -- the lower the chances of getting pregnant at all and the higher the likelihood the woman will miscarry. A final note on this new information on men's fertility: It seems your clocks have less hours in the day than ours. Men's fertility, it is now known, sharply decreases at the age of 24. That's six years before women's fertility declines.Will this change how men and women make decisions about when to parent? Will men's attitudes align with science so that they feel free to acknowledge their own flippy urges to reproduce more freely? Perhaps only time -- and more studies -- will tell.Are you worried about your man's fertility? Do these new studies take the pressure off you or just complicate conception even more?