Remember that story I wrote about a while back about the study of Mormons in the 19th century that found that having lots of kids takes a toll?

Well, articles are still coming out about the topic, this one looking at the effect a large family has on dads.

It's not only moms getting years whittled off their life spans by bigger broods apparently, at least according to University of Utah professor Ken Smith and Dustin Penn of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Not nearly as dramatically as shaving years off women's lives, there is, nonetheless, compelling evidence that kids make for a shorter span for fathers, as well.

And when it comes to the men, it's not the biological process of adding children that's causing the wear and tear, so in theory it matters not at all if we're talking families made from scratch or those built through adoption.

In one of the largest studies ever to examine mortality and reproduction, the researchers examined genealogical data on 21,684 couples married in Utah between 1860 and 1895, and their 174,000 children. Smith said it was necessary to use data from the 19th century in order to follow the original couples and their children until the end of their lives. The timing also allowed Smith and Penn to look at a population that could not control reproduction with modern contraceptive methods.

The study found that for each additional child a man had after his first, his mortality rate went up by 12 percent in the five years after his final child was born. For mothers, the mortality rate rose by 21 percent for each additional child. After this five-year period, 7.8 percent of men and 11.1 percent of women had died. Women continued to incur greater "survival costs" even after menopause. The study compared mothers with other women of the same age, and fathers with same-age fathers.

Smith and Dunn speculate that one reason fathers died earlier was because they had become widowers and had to shoulder the stress of raising a family alone. Other reasons include the increased risk of poverty with each additional child, and the introduction of more germs.

One father of 8 kids under 12 isn't worried and points out that his brood keeps him outdoors, active and young, but I have to wonder how much time he'd have for that if he suddenly found himself single-parenting ...

The report continues to be interesting, and reinforces, for me at least, that what matters is what we choose to do with the time we have, not how much of it there ends up being.