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Washington: This is not just the maternal smoking that affects children before birth, but also paternal smoking. A new study showed that children exposed to paternal smoking before birth were more likely to develop asthma and immune-related changes.
The study published in "Frontiers in Genetics" could provide DNA targets for the early prediction and reversal of childhood asthma badociated with smoking.
"We found that prenatal exposure to paternal smoking was badociated with increased methylation of certain immune genes, which altered the reading of the genetic code," said Dr. Chih Chiang Wu, lead author of the program. study. "This methylation of smoking-badociated DNA is significantly conserved from birth to age 6 and is correlated with the development of asthma in children," Wu added.
It is already known that exposure to tobacco smoke during development has adverse effects on children in various ways and that "epigenetic" non-coding modifications of DNA (such as methylation) have been involved several times.
However, this study is the first to show that paternal smoking during pregnancy can schedule epigenetic modifications of important genes in the immune system – and that these changes are badociated with an increased risk of asthma in children. The study was conducted on Taiwanese families, whose lifestyle and genetic makeup were badyzed to determine the relationship between smoking in fathers during pregnancy and the risk of asthma in their children.
"Twenty-three percent of fathers (367 out of a cohort of 1629 couples with newborns) were smokers, compared with only three of the mothers (0.2%) .This unique disparity was the perfect opportunity to To study the effects of paternal tobacco smoking (PTS), "said Dr. Ho Chang Kuo, co-author of the study.
The researchers followed 1629 children from birth to 18 months (1348) to six years (756), with medical evaluation and DNA badysis at every moment. At age six, the risk of asthma was significantly higher in infants exposed to PTS before birth than in those who did not.
"Children with prenatal PTS exposure of more than 20 cigarettes per day had a significantly higher risk of developing asthma than those with less than 20 cigarettes a day and those who were not exposed to PTS before birth: 35%, 25% and 22.7%, respectively, "said Dr. Kuender Yang, lead author of the study.
The results of the DNA badysis, however, were more striking. The higher the dose of PTS exposure, the higher the level of LMO2, IL10 and GSTM1 gene methylation is known to play a key role in immune function, which could provide a mechanical link to the risk of asthma.
"The combination of higher methylation levels of the three genes corresponded to the highest risk of asthma: 43.48%, compared to 16.67-23.08% for any other combination," added Dr. Yang. "It has already been shown that paternal smoking before pregnancy has the effect of altering the methylation of sperm DNA, with an increased risk of asthma in offspring," added Dr. Wu.
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