Up to two per cent of UK fathers may be the victims of paternity fraud after being tricked into raising another man's biological child, according to new DNA research.

While the figure derived, which equates to 1 in 50 British dads, may seem scarily high, the study actually suggests men across the land should breathe a sigh of relief: researchers expected the rate to be almost five times higher.

Dr Maarten Larmuseau, a researcher in KU Leuven University's laboratory of Biodiversity and lead author on the study, said that this expectation was born from the high incidence of female infidelity in humans (estimated to be 5–27pc for people younger than 30-years old), and the sensationalist picture painted by reality television such as The Jeremy Kyle Show.

"Media and popular scientific literature often claim that many alleged fathers are being cuckolded into raising children who biologically are not their own," he writes in the study, which looked back at extra-pair paternity (EPP) over recent decades.