Does the age of the father affect the health of the child?

For many years, world experts in biology and medicine have been trying to determine the relationship between the age of parents and the health of their children. However, attention is mainly paid to the age of the mother at the birth of the baby: after all, a woman must conceive, normally carry and give birth to a child without passing on some of her diseases that could accumulate over the years. Now scientists are interested - is the health of the child impaired if the father is no longer young? Does the age of the father at the time of conception play an important role?

As it turned out, late fatherhood also affects the future health of the offspring. A number of studies have already been conducted that have confirmed that if a child is born to an older man, the baby has a significantly increased risk of developing such mental disorders as manic-depressive psychosis, autism, attention deficit syndrome, suicidal tendencies, etc.

Professor Dan Ehninger and his team, representing several German scientific and medical centers, began to study the relationship between the quality of health of children and the age of their fathers. The experiment was as follows. The specialists obtained offspring from male rodents of different ages: the youngest male was 4 months old, and the oldest was 21 months old. The female mothers were young - 4 months old, and all the rodents represented a single genetic line. The scientists assessed the newborn mice according to a number of parameters. Typical changes inside organs and tissues, violations of protein structures, etc. were taken into account. All the babies developed in equal conditions and were separated from their fathers - that is, they never interacted with them. Already in the 19th month of their life, it was discovered that the mice born to the "old men" began to show early signs of aging, and as a result, their lives were shorter by 2 months (which is quite a lot for rodents). It turned out that the mice whose fathers were younger lived longer and aged more slowly.

The aging process occurs simultaneously with the accumulation of mutations. It may well be that mutations from older males provoked rapid DNA mutations in the offspring. But, what is remarkable is that in both the first and second groups of offspring, mutation accumulation occurred at the same rate.
However, the most obvious difference was found in the epigenetic direction. Scientists pointed to DNA methylation: methyl chemical groups are attached to DNA, as a result of which the genes subject to these groups change the strength of their work. Such modifications exist for a long time and change only with age. As scientists discovered, small offspring rodents of different groups had differences in the pattern of methyl DNA marks. Such modifications had much in common in older males and their offspring, and the changes were recorded specifically on the genes responsible for the duration of life and the development of age-related diseases. Simply put, old fathers seemed to have tuned the gene activity of their offspring to aging.

And yet, it is too early to draw conclusions. Scientists need to understand how molecular aging is inherited. And experiments on rodents cannot be compared with the processes that occur in the human body.
The study is described on the pages of pnas.org

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