MONDAY, June 12 (HealthDay News) -- As males age, the quality of their sperm declines as do their chances of achieving a pregnancy, according to a study published online June 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition. Aging in males is associated with a greater risk of having offspring with certain genetic conditions, but not others, such as Down syndrome. In addition, genetic defects cannot be inferred from conventional measures of semen quality.
Andrew J. Wyrobek, Ph.D., from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and colleagues examined genomic defects in sperm from 97 healthy, non-smoking men aged 22 to 80 years.
Overall, the frequency of sperm with DNA fragmentation in the fibroblast growth factor receptor 3 gene, which is associated with achondroplasia and can cause dwarfism, increased with age. In contrast, there was no association between age and the frequencies of sperm with other types of DNA or chromosomal damage, sex ratio, or risk of fathering offspring with aneuploid diseases such as Down, Klinefelter, Turner, triple X, and XYY syndromes. Except for an association between DNA fragmentation and sperm motility, there was no correlation between semen quality and genomic defects, according to the study.
The findings "suggest that the burden of genomic damage in sperm cannot be inferred from semen quality, and that a small fraction of men are at increased risk for transmitting multiple genetic and chromosomal defects," Wyrobek and colleagues conclude.
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