Height matters when it comes to having children, according to a study showing that tall men are likely to have more kids than their shorter contemporaries. But the reverse is true for women, according to details of the study published in the Independent newspaper on Wednesday. The survey of 10,000 people born in 1958 found that height plays an important role in finding a partner and having children by the age of 42. British men of average height—5ft 10in—had significantly fewer children by middle age than a 6ft 1in tall man, the newspaper reported. For women, those most likely to be married with children by the same age were between 4ft 11in and 5ft 2in, below the average female height of 5ft 4in. The study’s author, Daniel Nettle, said the findings showed the difference in height between the sexes continued to play a role in the likelihood of someone finding a partner and having children with them. ‘‘It is known from psychological tests that women find tall men attractive but that men don’t particularly find tall women attractive,’’ he said. Infertile? It may be in the DNA Infertile men who have normal-looking sperm may in fact have unseen DNA damage that can not only interfere with their attempts to conceive a child but could affect the child’s future health, US researchers said. Writing in the journal Fertility and Sterility, Dr Ramadan Saleh of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and colleagues said fertility specialists may want to have a closer look at the sperm of men who have repeated trouble conceiving. ‘‘Male-factor infertility plays a role in approximately 50% of infertile couples,’’ Saleh’s team wrote. Usually male infertility is diagnosed by simply looking at the sperm. If it is shaped normally and can swim strongly, it is considered normal. If a couple cannot conceive normally, sometimes doctors try injecting the sperm into the egg, a procedure called ICSI. But ICSI does not always work, and earlier studies suggested that men who used the technique were passing infertility problems to the next generation. Saleh’s team compared the sperm of 92 men undergoing fertility treatment to that of 16 fertile men. Sixty-two % of the infertile men with abnormal-appearing sperm had high levels of DNA damage in their sperm. But just under a quarter of the infertile men, 21 of them had normal-looking sperm. Of these, nine of the men, or 43%, had high levels of DNA damage. If such sperm was used to fertilise an egg, the result could be anything from a failure to conceive to a child with cancer. (Reuters)
