Fatherly Risk

Papa may cause defects too

When thousands of badly deformed babies were born in the early 1960s to women who had taken the tranquilizer thalidomide, the tragedy underscored a brutal fact of life: would-be mothers exposed to drugs during pregnancy can endanger the health of their offspring. Indeed, doctors have long assumed that the mother alone is responsible for chemically induced birth defects. The father was considered blameless. At worst, a male's lifestyle--whether he took drugs, for example, or smoked or drank--might affect his own health but not that of his child. Now some doctors are beginning to suspect that dad's habits may be as damaging to the unborn child as mom's.

The new theory is based largely on work with laboratory animals. At the University of Vermont College of Medicine, Pharmacologist Lester Soyka and Psychologist Justin Joffe have been administering methadone to male rats a few days before letting them mate with drug "clean" females. Among the adverse effects on the offspring: small litter size, low birth weights and excessive number of deaths among the newborn. Preliminary experiments with morphine, caffeine and the painkiller propoxyphene (Darvon) produced similar patterns.

Just how such drugs could exert an influence through the male is something of a mystery. Soyka speculates that the chemicals might do their dirty work in a number of ways: by damaging sperm during or after their development; by changing the character of the seminal fluid, in which the sperm are transported; or by so altering mating habits that the changed male behavior might engender harmful hormonal changes in the female.

The evidence with animals is yet to be confirmed by other labs, and when it comes to humans it is no more than anecdotal. But there are a few provocative bits of information. Among medical workers who are around anesthetics regularly--and thus presumably take in some of the gases--there seems to be a higher rate of spontaneous abortions and birth defects: these findings apply to the males who father the children as well as the mothers. This week, at a National Foundation-March of Dimes-sponsored Birth Defects Conference in Chicago, Dr. Louis Bartoshesky of Tufts-New England Medical Center is scheduled to discuss the case of a baby born with signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. Only the father was a heavy drinker.

For would-be papas, the message seems to be: mind your habits, if you plan an heir.

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