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Want a baby at 40?
Taking a toy boy doesn’t just boost a woman’s confidence – it may improve her chances of having a baby too.
According to doctors, once a woman hits 40, she should seek out a younger man if she wants to get pregnant. A study of women aged 40-plus found if her partner was aged 43½ and a half or above, her odds of giving birth plummeted. It means the growing breed of ‘cougars’ – middle-aged women who date considerably younger men – might have the right idea. Canadian researchers believe the problem is in the man’s sperm, which drops in quality with age. A young woman’s egg is able to repair any defects. But older eggs struggle to make the repairs.
Michael Dahan, of McGill University in Montreal, said one solution is for older women to choose toy boys, whose sperm will be in better condition. He said: ‘Ideally, as young as you can get. It actually gives a biological argument for the cougar phenomenon.’ Film director Sam Taylor-Wood, 47, last year had her second child with husband Aaron, 23 years her junior. Other older celebrities who have chosen toy boys include Halle Berry, 48, who had a baby with Gabriel Aubry, nine years her junior. The study, presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s annual conference in Honolulu, is the first to provide evidence that men, like women, have a biological clock. Dr Dahan and colleague Noof Al-Asmari studied 631 women aged 40 to 46 using IVF. Their partners ranged in age from 25 to 73. When the women were split into two groups – those who had babies and those who didn’t – the average age of the men who did not become fathers was just 43 and a half. This applied no matter how old the woman was. Dr Dahan said: ‘Younger women’s eggs can fix any defects of genetic material of the sperm. But once a woman hits 40, that’s no longer true. It suggests once the woman is reaching 40 and the man is in his early 40s as well, the male is having a biological clock.’
Dagan Wells, an Oxford University fertility doctor, said there may be a ‘tipping point’ at which an older egg is faced with such poor quality sperm it cannot make it good again. A bowl of ice cream a day could boost an older woman’s chances of having a baby. Women aged 35-plus who ate dairy products more than three times a day were 21 per cent more likely to conceive than those who did not, a study found. Jorge Chavarro, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, suggested that progesterone, a female hormone in milk, may be boosting fertility. Written By Fiona Macrae Retrieved From
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