Women and girls whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers started smoking at an early age tend to have more body fat, according to research.
It was found that if a father started smoking regularly before puberty, his sons would have more body fat than expected.
Researchers believe they have found higher body fat in females with grandfathers or great-grandfathers who started smoking before the age of 13. There were no effects on male descendants.
The research suggests that exposure to substances can lead to changes that may be passed down through the generations, though the team behind the research concedes that much more work is needed to confirm this and understand how it may happen.
The University of Bristol study provides detail and depth of inter-generational data that the scientists could not have anticipated when it was launched in 1991.
The founder of Children of the 90s and lead author of the latest report praised the participants in the study, an original cohort of 14,000 pregnant women who agreed to take part plus, now, their children and grandchildren.
The finding 20 years ago that women who eat oily fish only once every two weeks have children with sharper eyesight is one of the pieces of research that could not have been foreseen. It was believed to be the first time a diet in pregnancy was linked to a child's visual development.
A study published in 2013 concluded that there could be an adverse effect on children's mental development. The study had urine samples from early in participants' pregnancies and detailed records of what the expectant mothers were eating.
There is a link between peanut allergies and skin cream containing peanut oil, as well as early signs of a genetic liability to Type 2 diabetes, which can be spotted in children as young as eight. The Children of the 90s project has allowed experts to examine how wounds heal by looking at participants' vaccine scars.
The data on the smoking experiences of grandfathers and great-grandfathers was dug into for the latest study. They were not able to look into the smoking of grandmothers and great-grandmothers because they were so few to begin with, but they were confident that they would have reliable data from the male side of the family because they were likely to brag about smoking at a young age.
The research gives us two important results. Exposure of a boy to substances before puberty might affect generations that follow him. Second, one of the reasons why children become overweight may be not so much about their current diet and exercise, but about the lifestyle of their ancestors or the persistence of associated factors over the years.
Animals have shown that exposure to certain chemicals can have effects on their offspring, but there is doubt as to whether this phenomenon is present in humans.
If these associations are confirmed in other datasets, this will be one of the first human studies with data suitable to begin to look at these associations and to begin to unpick the origin of potentially important cross-generation relationships. Golding said there was a lot more to discover.
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