frasier Star Kelsey Grammer has announced that she is expecting her eighth child at age 70, an age that doctors consider well beyond “advanced paternal age.”
This will be the Health The actor's fourth child with his wife, film producer Kayte Walsh, 46. The couple share Faith, 12, Gabriel, 10, and James, eight.
“It was about three days ago,” Grammer told the The capsule meets the world podcast earlier this week. “Christopher, you just joined the family.”
Grammer is certainly not the oldest father-to-be, nor the oldest father in Hollywood. The actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, from the godfather fame, had children at ages 79 and 83, respectively.
But fathers older than just 35 are more likely to have children with adverse birth outcomes, according to Stanford Medicine researchers, and Rutgers University researchers say those older than 45 have a higher risk of pregnancy complications, premature and late births, seizures in newborns and birth defects.
The older the father is, the greater the risk of suffering from these and other conditions.
“For example, men age 45 and older were 14 percent more likely to have a premature child, and men age 50 and older were 28 percent more likely to have a child requiring admission to the neonatal intensive care unit,” the researchers said, citing a previous study of more than 40 million births.
A father's age can even affect his partner's health, leaving mothers at a disproportionate risk of developing diabetes and the life-threatening complication of preeclampsia.
“We tend to look at maternal factors when assessing associated birth risks, but this study shows that having a healthy baby is a team sport, and the father's age also contributes to the baby's health,” Dr. Michael Eisenberg, associate professor of urology, said in 2018.
Babies fathered by men of advanced paternal age are also at increased risk of childhood cancer, autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia. However, these diseases are caused by combinations of genetic and nongenetic factors, according to doctors at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Experts have linked these results to decreased levels of testosterone (the male sex hormone) and the natural degradation of sperm and semen quality.
“In addition to advancing paternal age being associated with an increased risk of male infertility, there appear to be other adverse changes that can occur in sperm with aging,” explained Gloria Bachmann, director of the Women's Health Institute at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
“For example, just as people lose muscle strength, flexibility and endurance with age, in men, sperm also tend to lose fitness throughout the life cycle.”
Still, being an older parent does not mean that a baby will automatically develop any of these conditions.
Eisenberg compared the risk to buying lottery tickets.
“If you buy two lottery tickets instead of one, your chances of winning double, so they increase by 100 percent,” he said. “But that is a relative increase. Because your chances of winning the lottery at the beginning were very small, you are still unlikely to win the lottery.”
The age at which many men become fathers in the United States is increasing. It increased 3.5 years between 1972 and 2015 and the number of babies born to parents over 45 has increased 10 percent in the last 40 years.
