Die Gesundheit von Männern hat Einfluss auf die Schwangerschaft und den Ausgang des Kindes und sollte in die Leitlinien einbezogen werden. Die präkonzeptionelle Gesundheit von Männern und Partnern wird derzeit von Politik und Gesellschaft vernachlässigt. Forscher sagen, dass künftige Gesundheitsrichtlinien für Männer vor der Empfängnis berücksichtigt werden müssen.

Men’s health impacts pregnancy and child outcomes, and should be included in guidelines, experts say

In short:

A new review published in the Lancet argues the pre-conception health of men and partners is currently overlooked by policies and society.

Clinical factors such as sperm health were considered, as well as behavioural factors, including the level of support given to pregnant people before and after birth.

What’s next?

Researchers say men need to be included future pre-conception health guidelines, a recommendation welcomed by Australian experts.

For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00148-0/abstract

Reminds me of how it was only in the last few years that they discovered that fathers drinking heavily [may be an independent cause of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40650419/). I would bet a bunch of other stuff is going to come up with further research. It would be good to have these guidelines for guys who are trying for kids 🙂

> Clinical factors such as sperm health were considered, as well as behavioural factors, including the level of support given to pregnant people before and after birth.

Do behavioural factors count as ‚health‘ issues? I wholly agree that if someone is likely to be a bad, unsupportive parent that should be considered, but I don’t see it as a ‚men’s health‘ issue.

This will also affect public policy that many women have to deal with, where medical decisions are influenced by „you might get pregnant, so we have to limit your options“ even for women who are childfree.

When men start hearing that, those policies will change *fast*.

There has been a lot of recent research coming out about how men’s health pre-conception could reflect in their sperm and deliver epigenetic changes to their future offspring. It’s really fascinating stuff.

> Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring. These non-DNA transfers may influence genomic activity that boots up during and after fertilization, exerting some control over the embryo’s development and influencing the adult they will become. [Source](https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-dads-fitness-may-be-packaged-and-passed-down-in-sperm-rna-20251222/)

There have been a lot of studies showing these effects in male mice and their offspring. Hopefully human studies will follow. For now, though, it definitely wouldn’t hurt for men to consider healthier lifestyle changes if they’re interested in having kids.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the report for those who don’t want to read the whole thing.

On exercise:

> A team of more than two dozen Chinese researchers focused on the epigenetic transmission of exercise benefits, homing in on a set of microRNAs that reprogram gene expression in the early embryo. These changes ultimately result in skeletal muscle adaptations in adult offspring that enhance exercise endurance. The researchers found that well-exercised mice had more of these microRNAs in their sperm than sedentary mice did. When these microRNAs were transferred into zygotes, the adults they grew into were more physically fit, with more mitochondria in skeletal muscle and higher endurance.

> Intriguingly, the sperm of physically trained male humans also hosted higher levels of many of the same microRNAs than those of untrained cohorts. “This cross-species conservation suggests a potential role for these sperm mi[cro]RNAs in intergenerational exercise adaptations in humans,” the researchers wrote.

On diet:

> Chen, who moved to the U.S. academic circuit in 2015, and his team collected sperm RNAs from male mice fed different diets. The RNA assemblages in mice reared on high-fat foods differed dramatically from those in mice that were fed normal diets. And when the researchers injected the RNAs from the sperm of the fat-eating mice into a zygote, some of the male offspring showed metabolic issues associated with a high-fat diet.

On trauma:

> Mansuy creates trauma in mice by subjecting the animals to conditions such as restraint or maternal separation when they are young. Then she searches for molecular changes in reproductive cells that could cause similar consequences of trauma to manifest in the children or even grandchildren of the animals who directly endure it.

> She’s shown that traumatic stress alters metabolic pathways, especially those that involve lipids, in exposed male mice and their offspring. She has also found a similar metabolic profile in humans who experienced high stress in childhood. In mice, some of the metabolic changes remained discernible through five generations — a rare data-backed finding for epigenetic inheritance cascading through generations.

I was really self conscious about exposure to lead through 100LL avgas which I had accidentally spilled on my hand 3 months prior to my wife falling pregnant. My daughter had several health issues and tumours (thankfully she is OK now) during the first stages of pregnancy and first few years of life. I get anxious and harbour some guilt that I may have contributed to the hardships she and my wife have had to endure.

I really wouldnt be surprised if there are significantly higher causal links between men’s health and child health than we currently acknowledge.