Wikipedia on Paternal Age

Paternal age
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article (or section) may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article, especially its section layout, and relevant internal links. (help)
This article has been tagged since December 2006.
Contents [hide]
1 Paternal Age Effect
2 Causes
3 Disorders Correlated With Paternal Age
4 References
5 External links



[edit] Paternal Age Effect
Scientists know that a woman’s age at the time she conceives can affect her offspring’s genetic make-up. Women age 35 and older are at greater risk of delivering a child with a genetic disorder, such as Down Syndrome, due to an incorrect number of chromosomes. Less well known is that a man’s advanced age affects his offspring even more so than a woman's, on average. In what is called the paternal age effect, men 30 years and older have a greater probability than younger men of fathering a child with some kind of genetic defect, and this risk increases exponentially as he ages.


[edit] Causes
While the genetic information contained in a woman's eggs have only divided a few times before being "frozen" at birth, that within a man's sperm undergoes many divisions throughout his life, beginning at puberty. By age 20, the average male has undergone spermatogenesis 100 times. By age 40, that number has increased eight-fold. The many mutations related to paternal age are due to genetic copying errors that continually increase over a man's lifetime.


[edit] Disorders Correlated With Paternal Age
Achondroplasia (Dwarfism); craniofacial disorders such as Apert syndrome and Crouzon Syndrome; mental retardation of unknown etiologies; autism; and 25% of schizophrenia cases are correlated with advanced paternal age.

Other disorders related to advanced paternal age are:

Wilms tumour
thanatophoric dysplasia
retinitis pigmentosa
osteogenisis imperfecta type IIA
acrodysostosis
fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
aniridia
bilateral retinoblastoma
multiple exostoses
Marfan Syndrome
Lesch-Nyan Syndrome
Pfeiffer Syndrome
Wardenburg Syndrome
Treacher-Collins Syndrome
Soto’s basal cell nevus
cleidocranial dysostosis
polyposis coli
oculodentodigital syndrome
Costello syndrome
progeria
Recklinghausen’s neurofibromatosis
tuberous sclerosis
renal polycystic kidney disease
Hemophilia A
Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy
Athetoid Cerebral Palsy
Dystonic Cerebral Palsy
Congenital Hemiplegia

[edit] References