Recent research conducted predominantly by scientists from UQ and QUT have found a strong association between advanced paternal age and impaired neurocognitive abilities in children. The major analyses assessed children at various ages (up to 7 years old) on six different cognitive tests, consisting of physical coordination and the ability to think and reason; including concentration, memory, learning, understanding, speaking, and reading. Across the sample of 33,437 children, the researchers found that children with older fathers consistently scored lower across all tests except the measure of motor skills.Having already “taken into account social factors such as the parents’ level of education and income”, the scientists turned to biology to explain the peculiar phenomena. The simple rational put forward was that older fathers are likely to pass on more mutations. With levels of DNA proofreading and repair enzymes declining as a function of advanced paternal age on top of DNA fragmentation increases, the existence of more copy error mutations in older men is no surprise. Thus older paternal figures within a population increase genetic variation by increasing genetic load. The scientists concluded that the alarming association between older fathers and deficits in neurocognitive outcomes warrants closer scrutiny and, in future, they hope to conduct similar studies on adults.
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