
TUESDAY, Sept. 5, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Smoking may not only harm the smoker and those that breathe within the secondhand fumes, but additionally their future children.
Latest research suggests that boys who smoke of their early teens risk passing on harmful genetic traits to future children. The study probed the genetic profiles of 875 people between 7 and 50 years of age and their father’s smoking behavior.
People whose dads were early-teen smokers had gene markers related to asthma, obesity and low lung function. Biomarkers related to this were different from those related to maternal or personal smoking, the researchers found.
That is the primary human study to disclose the biological mechanism behind the impact of fathers’ early smoking on their children, in accordance with researchers from the University of Southampton in the UK and the University of Bergen in Norway.
“Changes in epigenetic markers were way more pronounced in children whose fathers began smoking during puberty than those whose fathers had began smoking at any time before conception,” said study co-author Negusse Kitaba, a research fellow on the University of Southampton.
“Early puberty may represent a critical window of physiological changes in boys. That is when the stem cells are being established which is able to make sperm for the remainder of their lives,” Kitaba explained in a university news release.
The researchers found epigenetic changes at 19 sites mapped to 14 genes in the youngsters of early-smoking dads. These changes in the way in which DNA is packaged in cells regulate gene expression and are related to these particular health issues, in accordance with the report.
“The health of future generations will depend on the actions and decisions made by young people today — long before they’re parents — specifically for boys in early puberty and moms/grandmothers each pre-pregnancy and while pregnant,” said co-author Dr. Cecilie Svanes of the University of Bergen. “It is actually exciting that we’ve now been capable of discover a mechanism that explains our observations.”
The researchers also compared fathers’ preconception smoking profiles with individuals who smoked and people whose moms smoked before conception.
“Interestingly, we found that 16 of the 19 markers related to fathers’ teenage smoking had not previously been linked to maternal or personal smoking,” said co-author Gerd Toril Mørkve Knudsen of the University of Bergen. “This implies these latest methylation biomarkers could also be unique to children whose fathers have been exposed to smoking in early puberty.”
While numbers of young smokers in the UK has fallen, co-author John Holloway from the University of Southampton expressed concern concerning the growing popularity of vaping.
“Some animal studies suggest that nicotine would be the substance in cigarette smoke that’s driving epigenetic changes in offspring,” Holloway said. “So, it’s deeply worrying that teenagers today, especially teenage boys, at the moment are being exposed to very high levels of nicotine through vaping.”
The evidence on this study comes from people whose fathers smoked as teens within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies when tobacco use was way more common, he noted.
“We are able to’t definitely be certain vaping may have similar effects across generations, but we shouldn’t wait a few generations to prove what impact teenage vaping may need. We want to act now,” Holloway said.
The respiratory health of future generations might be in danger, the authors said.
The study results were published online Aug. 31 in Clinical Epigenetics.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the dangers of smoking.
SOURCE: University of Southampton, news release, Aug. 30, 2023