Older fellows used to joke that they may have snow on the roof but there’s plenty of heat in the furnace. The kindling down there may not, however, be in such good shape. For just as pregnant, older women bear a somewhat higher chance their offspring will suffer birth defects such as Down Syndrome, aging men lose some of their ability to produce healthy children due to sperm deterioration. The older they are, the greater the number of broken sections in their DNA. One consequence is a rising chance of dwarfism. Or so says a study from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in the current PNAS. Best hed award goes to that over Emma Marris‘s byline in Nature online: “Senior sperm have dodgier DNA.” The findings on about 100 men, recruited from the lab’s workforce and roster of retirees, come as (in the US at least) men and women alike are delaying having children till later in life.
Stories:
AP Randolph E. Schmid; San Jose Mercury News Julie Sevrens Lyons; Reuters Maggie Fox; NYTimes Nicholas Bakalar; Washington Times Jennifer Harper; The Scotsman John von Radowitz; Contra Costa Times Betsy Mason; San Francisco Chronicle Sabin Russell; Scripps Howard Lee Bowman; Nature Emma Marris;
Grist for the Mill: LLNL Press Release;
See Also, in the heard-that-before department, a June 2005 European study’s similar Press Release;
Other Sperm News: NY Times rumination by Denise Grady on privacy, ethics, and genetics issues in sperm donation.
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