Yeah, when i read this first it was pretty distressing but then i reread reason’s recovery and i think it stands pretty strongly to justify that our children should be fine. and as bostunusa2009 said, if you’re that worried you should get tested for genetic defects in your sperm, don’t just give up that easily on something so important (well, it is to me) just based on presumption.
This is an excerpt from reason’s thread posted by ScaredMale30 explaining how, even if finasteride has effected us genetically, which is still unlikely, we can’t pass it on to our children.
[i]The simple facts governing genetic inheritance should, in fact, serve to reassure us that it is extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for us to pass on this condition to our children.
I’m sure we all remember that all humans have two chromosomes, XX if they are female, and XY if they are male.
When a male child is created, he obviously takes the Y chromosome from his father and the X chromosome from his mother.
The vast majority of our genetic information is carried on the X chromosome. That includes the gene for the androgen receptor.
That means that even if this condition has caused a genetic or epigenetic change to the androgen receptor, and even if - in the case of epigenetic change - that change was able to pass to subsequent generations, there is no way that we could pass that mutated androgen receptor gene on to our XY children, that is, our sons. Because when a father helps to create a son, he does that by passing his Y chromosome, not his X.
Say Let Xm stand for an X chromosome that is carrying a mutated androgen receptor gene. Then, if you accept that we are carrying a mutated androgen receptor gene (and that is a big jump) we look like this XmY. Our partners are like this XX. Any male child we have must look like this XY. We could pass our mutated gene to our daughters, who would look like this XmX. But that would not matter at all, because (i) women don’t need to be androgen responsive and (ii) the other X chromosome would override the faulty one, anyway.
These rules govern the inheritance of the known and acknowledged forms of androgen insensitivity. A male child can only inherit androgen insensitivity from his mother. If a mother looks like this: XmX and a father looks like this: XY, then you can get a male child like this: XmY, who suffers from androgen insensitivity, does not develop male characteristics, and is born appearing to be female.
Summarising the above, if our condition is indeed genetic or epigenetic in origin, it would almost certainly take the form of an X linked recessive condition, like other forms of androgen receptor dysfunction, which fathers cannot pass to sons.
Given all this, it seems unlikely in the extreme that we could give rise to any androgen insensitive male children, even if our condition is some kind of genetic or epigenetic change. The inheritance would have to take place in some way that is radically outside our current and pretty good understanding of how genetic inheritance works.
I think we can all take comfort in this.[/i]
