Asthma in babies: risk higher if fathers smoke during mother’s pregnancy, study shows
- A Taiwanese study looked at paternal smoking during pregnancy and its effects on immune system genes
- More than 1,600 babies were involved in the study, and 756 of those were followed for six years
Babies have a greater risk of asthma if their father smoked before their birth, according to a new study of Taiwanese families.
The research, published today in Frontiers in Genetics to coincide with the World Health Organisation’s World No Tobacco Day, also reveals how immune genes can predict the level of risk.
More than 1,600 Taiwanese couples with newborn babies took part in the study which analysed their lifestyle and genetic make-up.
Exposure to tobacco smoke during development is already known to harm children in many ways, and non-coding ‘epigenetic’ changes to DNA have been repeatedly found.
However, this is the first study to show that, just like maternal smoking or air pollution, paternal smoking during pregnancy can program epigenetic modifications in important immune system genes and these modifications increase the associated risk of childhood asthma.