For years, the impressive case of Charlie Chaplin, who fathered a child in his late 70s, has been the lecture-room example of man's lifelong fertility.
But last Friday, Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias' father trumped Chaplin by announcing he was to be a father again at the age of 90.
While studies have nailed down a significant drop in female fertility from the age of 35, unravelling the effect of age on male fertility is a tougher nut to crack.
"It's been extremely difficult because the older men we need to study tend to be married to older women who have gone through the menopause," said Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at Sheffield University, in the north of England.
Men produce sperm for the duration of their lives and indicators such as sperm count and swimming ability change very little with age, which could suggest that male fertility might not dip either.
But that is not the case. In 2000, researchers in Bristol, south-west England, looked at the rate of successful pregnancies among thousands of couples. They found men aged 40 and older were half as likely to get their partners pregnant as men under 25.
"What they couldn't tell was whether it was a biological effect, was it down to the fact that older men simply have less sex, which we know to be true, or that the longer people have been together, the less sex they have," Pacey said.
What is known is that as men age, the DNA in their sperm accumulates damage.
"If the DNA is damaged, they might get fertilization, but the embryo won't develop or it will miscarry" in most cases, Pacey said.
Last month, researchers in California reported a study of 70,000 couples which showed that men aged 50 and above were more than four times more likely to have a child with Down's syndrome.
Other studies have shown an increased prevalence of schizophrenia in children with older fathers.
"Much of the time, we don't see the effects of older paternal age ... The only time we can see what happens is when you get old, rich and powerful guys who somehow have much younger wives," Pacey said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema