Researchers at the University of Cambridge have propounded that teenage parents may be more likely to pass on birth defects to their children.
The Study looked at DNA of 24,000 parents and their children found that when the father was 20 or younger, the children had many more mutations than did children of older dads, as well as many more mutations than the offspring of teen mothers and adult dads. On average, fathers pass on at least six times as many mutations to their children as mothers.
The sperm cells of teenage fathers had a 30 per cent higher rate of DNA mutation, which may explain why the children of younger parents have been found to have a higher risk of disorders such as schizophrenia, autism and spina bifida.
The author, Peter Forster, said: “Children of 15-year-old boys have about 30% more mutations than children of young men. It could be that the whole sperm production system is more error prone at the start … that it just isn’t optimised yet.”
Birth defects occur when there is a problem in the copying of genetic or DNA materials during cell division. It is as a result of copying errors in the eggs or sperm cell. Here seems to be another reason why teens should abstain from sex.
