Women who have IVF face the risk of not getting pregnant if they take older men as partners

WOMEN who undergo fertility treatment and have IVF in the hope of having children in their older age face the risk of not being successful if their end up trying to procreate with older men.

According to the finding of a recent US study, the success rate of couples going through IVF is dependent on the age of the man and not just the woman. Older men were found to have a lower chances of conceiving than younger men with a female partner of the same age.

Harvard researchers presented their study of nearly 19,000 IVF cycles at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. Their findings contradict the idea that male fertility goes on forever.

According to the report, whether conception is natural or assisted, sperm mutations and a decline in sperm count in older men are thought to reduce the chances of pregnancy. Previous research has also shown that older sperm is more prone to genetic errors and this has been linked to the development of autism and schizophrenia in children.

However, the age of the woman still has a larger impact on fertility than the man’s age. In this study, scientists found that men aged 40 to 42 were linked with a 46% lower chance of having a baby by IVF than men aged 30 to 35, when the female partner was under 30.

Also, 35 year old women had significantly more success with a male partner under 30 after one cycle of treatment, than with a man in his mid-30s. Dr Laura Dodge, from Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Harvard Medical School, said the reasons behind reduced male fertility in older age were not completely clear.

She added: “While the effect of female age on fertility is overwhelmingly due to increased rates of chromosomal abnormality, the proposed mechanism in the effect of male age on pregnancy are more subtle. In the absence of clear evidence of the mechanism, the best pre-conception advice we can offer is to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

Nick Macklon, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at University of Southampton, added: “This may encourage male partners to get a move on. It also offers new insights into the dynamics between the man and woman as it’s not just down to the age of the woman.”

Dr Raj Mathur, consultant gynaecologist and clinical lead for reproductive medicine at Manchester Fertility, said the issue of men’s age and its impact in IVF needed to be researched further in a larger database of couples. He added that we should thus start taking male age into account.

Women who used donor sperm were not included in the study of nearly 8,000 IVF couples. Dr Gillian Lockwood, the medical director of Midlands Fertility Services, said there were distinct differences between women’s and men’s fertility.

“Women are born with all their eggs and don’t make any new ones but men make new sperm every morning," she added.