Mysterious Effects of Smoking May Surface Even 3 Generations Later, Study Finds
The great-granddaughters of men who smoked cigarettes when they were pre-pubescent boys are more likely to carry excess fat on their bodies as young women several decades later, a rather startling study has found.
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The discovery – which scientists claim is one of the "first human demonstrations of transgenerational effects of an environmental exposure across four generations" – suggests ancestral exposures to things like tobacco smoke may have consequences that linger within families undetected for entire generations.
"If these associations are confirmed in other datasets, this will be one of the first human studies with data suitable to start to look at these associations and to begin to unpick the origin of potentially important cross-generation relationships," says epidemiologist Jean Golding from Bristol University in the UK.
In 2014, Golding and fellow researchers assessed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (aka, the 'Children of the 90s' study), an observational study of pregnant women and their families, which began in the early 1990s and was initially led by Golding.
The 2014 analysis of questionnaire data from the Children of the 90s study revealed that the sons of fathers who started smoking before they were 11 years old were more likely to have a higher body mass index (BMI) in adolescence, with increased average waist circumference and whole-body fat mass.