A new study by researchers at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development shows that older fathers are not more likely to have children with schizophrenia or other neurodevelopmental behavioral disorders because of new mutations in their genes, as widely reported. The new study which appears in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, contradicts the implications of a widely publicized paper published in the journal Nature 488, 439 (23 August 2012) which suggested that the age of a father was a strong contributing risk factor for these neurodevelopmental behavioral disorders because the sperm of older fathers is more likely to contain new mutations in genes. Articles about the Nature study published in The New York Times and elsewhere even suggested that young men might cryopreserve their sperm for later life children to reduce risk of these types of disorders.
