Desire to have children: Dad's age is also decisive
Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.
More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.From the age of 30, a woman's chances of becoming a mother deteriorate. But how old the potential father is also plays a not insignificant role. This even applies if the child is to be conceived with the help of artificial insemination.
Chaplin, Picasso, Pavarotti - all well-known men who became fathers at an advanced age. But these prominent examples cannot hide the fact that the biological clock is ticking for men too - albeit not as emphatically as it is for women.
Previous studies have shown that as men get older, it becomes more difficult to become a father. Researchers from Harvard Medical School in Boston have now been able to show that this also applies to artificial insemination.
19,000 attempts to have a child
To this end, the scientists evaluated data from more than 7,700 couples who had tried in a total of around 19,000 cycles to father a child with the help of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
For the assessment, the researchers looked at the “cumulative live birth rate” - also known as the “baby take home rate”. It does not describe the chances of success with the first IVF attempt, but rather the probability with which the women gave birth to a child with the help of fertilization in the test tube - regardless of how many attempts were necessary.
The father's age has a big influence
The result: The age of the father played a considerable role in the baby chances of the younger women among the patients. Of the under 30-year-olds whose partners were between 30 and 35 years old, 70 percent had a baby as part of one or more fertility treatments. However, if the partner was between 40 and 42 years old, the procedure was only successful in 46 percent of the cases.
Higher chances of having a baby with a younger partner
The age of the potential father can also be decisive for women between 30 and 35. If her partner was younger than herself, namely under 30, the chances of having children come true were 70 percent. With a partner of about the same age between 30 and 35 years, on the other hand, the chances of success for parents' happiness were a good third lower at 54 percent.
Women over 40 have poor baby chances
As expected, women in the oldest group (40 to 42 years) had the worst chance of having a child. In this age group, the father's age no longer had any influence on the desire to have children. The unfavorable effect that the age beyond 40 has on the fertility of women is so great that the negative male influence is no longer significant.
Female fertility decreases significantly more
Overall, women lost an average of 42 percent of their chances of having a baby by the age of 42. In the case of men, however, it was at least 20 percent.
In women, chromosomal abnormalities in particular cause fertility to decline even before menopause. The mechanisms for men are less clear. It is true that a poorer semen quality with fewer and less agile sperm cells plays a role. “But the declining fertility cannot be explained by the quality of the semen alone,” the researchers write. Here, too, abnormal chromosomes may play a role, but also so-called epigenetic changes, as a result of which the gene activity of the sperm cells changes unfavorably. All of these factors can affect fertilization, egg implantation, or embryo development.
Fertilization in the test tube
For fertilization in the test tube, an egg cell is removed from the woman, which is then fertilized with a sperm and then reinserted. In order for this to be possible, the woman has to endure a course of hormone injections. Because treatment is grueling and costly, many couples give up after the first unsuccessful attempt.
