Second Generation Birth Defect

Second-Generation Birth Defects

Second-Generation Birth Defects The risk of having a child with a birth defect is twice as high for men who were born with a birth defect than other fathers, alarge population study has revealed. The second-generation risk also appeared higher, at least for dissimilar birth defects, than for children of mothers who had been born with a birth defect (Journalof the American Medical Association, Feb. 14, 2001). Scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the University of Bergen, in Norway, reviewed Norwegianbirths since 1967. They compared 12,000 men who had been born with a recognized defect with nearly half a million unaffected men. The men had fathered 1,265 children, with 21 of those children (1.6percent) born with the same defect as their father. This is about seven times the risk of those same defects in the general population, but it is about the same risk as a previous study on the children ofwomen with birth defects. However, the children of fathers with birth defects also had a higher risk of having different, unrelated disorders. Forty-three children (3.4 percent) had defects that werenot like their father's, compared to an expected number of 24 (1.9 percent). This result was in contrast to the findings of the previous study involving women, in which those born with defects appearedto have no increased risk of having babies with defects that were different from the mother's. The total risk of birth defects was 5.1 percent among the children of affected fathers, or twice the 2.1percent risk of the children of other fathers. The risk was spread out across categories of defects. "Five percent of children with birth defects is not a whole lot, but it still is more than doublewhat we see in the children of unaffected fathers," stated Allen J. Wilcox, MD, PhD, chief of epidemiology at NIEHS in the National Institutes of Health. "What surprised us is that the children of...