Children whose parents breathed cigarette smoke more likely to get asthma – study

A new study has found that children are more likely to develop asthma if their father smoked tobacco when he was a kid.

They are more likely to suffer from the common lung condition if their father was a smoker.

Smoking can damage the health of people born two generations later according to the findings published in the European Respiratory Journal.

The risk of non-allergic asthma in children increases by 59% if their fathers were exposed to secondhand smoke in childhood.

If fathers were exposed to secondhand smoke and smoked themselves, the risk was even higher, said one of the co- authors.

A group of researchers from Australia, Britain, and Sri Lanka undertook the study.

The damage caused by smoking can have an impact on smokers and their children, as well as their children's and granddaughters.

Men should try to stop smoking if they can, to reduce the risk of their own sons or their offspring being affected by smoking.

Jon Foster is the health policy manager at Asthma + Lung UK. The impact smoking has on other people's health is shown by the fact that children born today have an increased risk of developing asthma if their father smoked as a child.

The data about the health of fathers and their children was collected as part of the long- running Tasmanian Longitudinal Health Study.

According to the paper, when boys are exposed to tobacco smoke before the age of 15 years, their offspring have an increased risk of asthma, but not allergic asthma.

Smoking before the age of 15 is a major risk factor for asthma.

The chair of the European Respiratory Society's tobacco control committee, who was not involved in the study, said it added to the evidence of smoking's intergenerational risk.

He said that children needed to be protected from further damage by the government. He called for stop smoking services to be increased and for adults to be asked if they smoked at any National Health Service appointment.

The most likely reason for the increased risk of asthma in children whose fathers smoked in their youth is due to epigenetic changes triggered by smoking.

Epigenetic changes can be caused by smoking and they can be passed on to future generations. Tobacco smoke can cause epigenetic changes to a boy's germ cells. These cells are used to make sperm.

These changes will be passed on to his children, which can damage their health and increase their risk of asthma. In boys, germ cells continue to develop until puberty, and this is a vulnerable period when exposure to tobacco smoke can affect the cells.