Health risks soar for older mothers

Doctors have issued a stark warning about the dangers facing couples who delay parenthood.

Women who postpone having children until they are 35 are at greater risk of suffering complications and damage to sperm can make it more difficult for older men to father children.

The annual meeting of the European Society of Reproduction and Embryology in Copenhagen heard how a team from Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital, west London, found that women over 35 who had more than one child were almost 100 times more likely to die from a blood clot on the lung than a first-time mother aged 20.

Professor Michael de Swiet said more than 10 per cent of first-time mothers were over 35 in 2002 compared with three per cent in 1990.

Older mothers are at high risk of miscarriage, stillbirth and having children with problems such as Down's Syndrome.

The trend to delay childbirth is typified by high- profile women including Brooke Shields, who was 38 when she had her first child, Mariella Frostrup, who was 41, and Sarah Jessica Parker, who was 37.

Professor de Swiet said: "The risk of stillbirth increases from four per 1,000 in women up to 29 to 10 per 1,000 in those aged 40. At 42, more than half of pregnancies result in foetal loss."

He went on to say that although few older women die in pregnancy, it was clear how "tired and ill they become".

Women who want to delay motherhood for a career should aim to have their first child between 25 and 35, he said. Between 35 and 45 was "safe enough" but there were risks of reduced fertility, miscarriage and chromosonal abnormalities, while after the age of 45 it was "only for the healthy and wealthy". In another paper, a team in Canada have found older men are more likely to suffer damage to the DNA in their sperm, making it more difficult to conceive and having pregnancies which are more likely to end in miscarriage.

A series of high-profile men have become fathers late in life, including 60-year-old Rod Stewart, whose fiancé¥ Penny Lancaster is expecting his sixth child, and Sir Paul McCartney who was 61 when his daughter Beatrice was born.

Dr Sergey Moskovtsev of the Mount

Sinai Hospital, Toronto, said: "Older men tend to reproduce with older women and the combination of increased female factor infertility and increased sperm DNA damage will have a pronounced impact." He said that as damage to sperm DNA cannot be repaired, a method of identifying and selecting sperm without damage for use in fertility treatment needs to be found.

Dr Moskovtsev said: "The effect of age on male fertility is particularly interesting because of the growth in the number of men choosing to father children at older ages.

"In the USA the birth rate for fathers older than 35 years increased by almost 20 per cent between 1980 and 1995.

"Many of these older couples will have trouble in conceiving and resort to IVF and ICSI (injecting a single sperm into a single egg). This will bypass the natural selection process and may lead to fertilisation by sperm with damaged DNA which can result in embryonic loss or unhealthy offspring."