Paternal age effect

This article needs more reliable medical references for verification or relies too heavily on primary sources. Please review the contents of the article and add the appropriate references if you can. Unsourced or poorly sourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Paternal age effect" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (May 2015)

The paternal age effect is the statistical relationship between the father's age at conception and biological effects on the child.^[1] Such effects can relate to birthweight, congenital disorders, life expectancy and psychological outcomes.^[2] A 2017 review found that while severe health effects are associated with higher paternal age, the total increase in problems caused by paternal age is low.^[3] Average paternal age at birth reached a low point between 1960 and 1980 in many countries and has been increasing since then, but has not reached historically unprecedented levels.^[4] The rise in paternal age is not seen as a major public health concern.^[3]

The genetic quality of sperm, as well as its volume and motility, may decrease with age,^[5][6] leading the population geneticist James F. Crow to claim that the "greatest mutational health hazard to the human genome is fertile older males".^[7]

The paternal age effect was first proposed implicitly by physician Wilhelm Weinberg in 1912^[8] and explicitly by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose in 1955.^[9] DNA-based research started more recently, in 1998, in the context of paternity testing.