Dad's Age May Lower Junior's IQ

March 9, 2009— -- Though the media have been abuzz in recent years over the phenomenon of cougars -- older women dating much younger men -- a new study hints that pairings of older mothers and younger fathers might be optimal for the children's IQs.

The study of more than 33,000 children in the United States looked at parental age and how it affected scores on intelligence tests at 8 months, 4 years and 7 years of age. While the children of older fathers scored slightly lower, the children of older mothers tended to perform slightly better.

"In general, you would predict that the offspring of older parents would do better, because the parents tend to have better socioeconomic position, stability, education, health literacy, etc.," said Dr. John McGrath, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia, and one of the study's authors.

"This is exactly what we see for the offspring of older mothers. This would probably be driven by understandable socio-cultural factors. Thus, the fact that we see the opposite pattern for fathers' age is startling."

The deficits of the children of older fathers -- whose sperm will degrade as it replicates over time, in contrast to eggs, which are formed early in a woman's development -- are worrisome, McGrath said, because of the trend of men waiting longer to have children.

That might even pose a problem to future generations.

"Over time, many societies are delaying parenthood," he said. "Worryingly, if the adverse health and educational outcomes we see are due to new mutations in dad's sperm cell, these will probably be transmitted to the next generation."

Given the size of the study, the small deficits found in the children of older fathers were still significant. But while other researchers called the findings interesting, they expressed skepticism at how well the findings would translate to today, because the sample of children in the study was taken between 1959 and 1965.