The question of how old is too old to grow up has been raised again with the birth of 79-year-old Robert De Niro’s seventh child.
Many people have children much later in life, but while most know the dangers of women waiting too long, few realize the risks that increase as men get older.
A great study published in 2006 found that once a man reaches age 50, his risk of having a child with autism is more than ten times higher than that for a man in his 20s. That risk doubles every decade thereafter.
And a Study from 2018 of more than 40 million births in the US, it found that fathers over the age of 45 were 14 percent more likely than fathers in their 20s and 30s to have their babies born prematurely and with low birth weights.
It is believed that older fathers also have a higher risk of having a child with, among other things, dwarfism, certain psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and bipolar and cardiovascular conditions.
The link between paternal age and autism has been researched for decades, with many large-scale studies involving government health databases and thousands of birth records.
New kid in his life: Robert De Niro shocked fans on Monday when he announced he had recently welcomed a baby. Seen May 6 in Chicago
Dr. Stuart Fischer, an internist in New York, told DailyMail.com, “It’s risky [having a child in old age] because older parents are not the same as 20 year old parents [biologically].’
Referring specifically to De Niro, Dr. Fischer said, “As an 80-year-old dad, does he go to the baseball game to check the kid’s homework and make sure you can tie your shoelaces? The answer is no… if we mean only him and not his assistants.’
The average age of new parents, especially mothers, has risen steadily in recent decades.
Experts believe this is because more and more women are choosing to pursue professional opportunities and become financially stable before settling down.
In the UK, the average age at which a woman becomes a mother is 30, which is almost five years older than in the 1970s and marks the oldest British mothers ever on average.
Meanwhile, women waiting to have children over the age of 30 face a variety of risks, from birth defects to chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome.
The risk of having a child with Down syndrome increases over timefrom about 1 in 1,250 for a woman who becomes pregnant at age 25 to about 1 in 100 for a woman who becomes pregnant at age 40.
This is because older eggs are at greater risk of incorrect chromosome division in a process called meiosis.
Typically, meiosis causes the chromosome material to be cut in half, so that each parent gives 23 chromosomes to a pregnancy, resulting in an egg or sperm cell with only 23 chromosomes.
If meiosis doesn’t go well, an egg or sperm can end up with too many or too few chromosomes.
Once fertilization is complete, the baby may have an extra chromosome called a trisomy or have a missing chromosome called a monosomy. People with Down syndrome have an extra copy of their twenty-first chromosome.
The rationale for the link between older paternal age and autism in offspring is much less clear. Some experts believe the cause is simple and biological, that as men age and sperm cells divide, genetic mutations can accumulate and are passed on to their descendants.
Another school of thought argues that older men on the autism spectrum, whether they know it or not, are likely to marry later in life and thus have a child at an older age to whom they can pass on an autism gene.
But the associated risks haven’t stopped plenty of celebs from diving into parenthood in their later years. George Clooney, Hugh Grant, Steve Martin, David Letterman, James Earl Jones, Simon Cowell, Jeff Goldblum, and John Stamos all became fathers for the first time in their 50s and beyond.
The link between paternal age and autism has been researched for decades based on extensive global studies involving thousands of government databases and birth records.
a Analysis of 2010 Swedish data shows that men over 55 are four times more likely to have a child with autism than men under 30.
The finding that older parents, especially older fathers, are more likely to have children on the autism spectrum has been repeated in several studies, but experts have not pinpointed the exact reason.
Dr. Maureen Durkin, an epidemiologist who specializes in the study of autism at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told DailyMail.com, “The likelihood of having a child with autism increases with parental age. and is very consistent across large studies.
“Maternal and paternal ages are often highly correlated in the population and it can be difficult to disentangle their effects on autism risk.” Some studies conclude that the risk is more related to the age of the mother, and others investigate the age of the father’
While a correlation between a father’s age and risk of autism has been well established, the differences in risk vary widely. While the risk appears to increase with paternal age, only about 1 percent of the world’s population has an autism spectrum disorder. In the US, that equates to about 1 in 36 children.
When considering the risk taken by older fathers, the relative size of the populations involved should be taken into account.
While the risk of a new father aged 50 or older having a child with autism is about ten times higher than their younger counterpart, that finding was made based on a sample of about 132,000 people in which 110 cases of autism spectrum disorder were identified.
Dr. Durkin said: ‘I would say that while the risk of autism increases with parental age (both maternal and paternal), the associations are modest (much less, for example, than the association between smoking and lung cancer) and the vast majority of children of older parents do not develop autism.’
a Study from 2006 by Abraham Reichenberg, a psychologist and epidemiologist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London, presented the first compelling evidence that older men are at higher risk of producing children with autism.
In that study, which included about 400,000 people in Israel, Dr. Reichenberg found that children of men over 40 were 5.75 times more likely to have autism than children of men under 30.
The study led to several more in Denmark and Sweden.
The Danish study, published in a 2014 episode of JAMA Psychiatry found that men age 45 or older had a 34 percent higher risk of passing on a psychiatric disorder, including autism.
And in Sweden, a large study was roughly looked at 2.6 million children born between 1973 and 2001. Researchers controlled for other possible causes and concluded that fathers over the age of 45 at the time of their child’s birth were 3.45 times more likely to have a child with autism.
A swipe international study in 2011 further quantified the risk based on data from more than 5.7 million live births in five countries. Researchers found that the odds of having a child with autism were 28 percent higher in fathers who were in their 40s, and 66 percent higher in men in their 50s compared to those younger than 30.