The great-granddaughters of men who smoked cigarettes when they were young boys are more likely to carry excess fat on their bodies later in life, according to a startling study.
The discovery suggests that exposure to tobacco smoke may 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 Jean Golding from Bristol University in the UK.
Golding and other researchers assessed data from the 'Children of the 90s' study, an observational study of pregnant women and their families, which began in the early 1990s.
The Children of the 90s study found that the sons of fathers who started smoking before they were 11 years old were more likely to have a higher body mass index in adolescence.
This was a rare example of a non-genetic transgenerational signal that was inherited by human offspring, with much of the existing evidence of the effects of ancestral exposures coming from studies involving animal models.
A deeper look into the Children of the 90s dataset shows that the phenomenon extends from a father to his son, to a grandfather to his granddaughter, and even from a great-grandfather to his great-granddaughter.
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When fathers of maternal grandfathers started smoking, their great-granddaughters, but not great-grandsons, had excess body fat.
The researchers say a similar effect can be seen even when the intervening generations don't smoke.
"Exposure of a boy to certain substances before puberty might have an effect on generations that follow him, and how it may be shaped by unseen influences," Golding says, noting that one of the important findings is the implications it has for our understanding of people's health today.
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 over the years.
The team acknowledges that their own analysis has a number of limitations, including that there was a large amount of missing data in terms of respondents' awareness of the childhoods and circumstances of their own.
They claim that their study offers the first-of-its-kind evidence of transgenerational effects, although they don't know how those effects arise.
The researchers acknowledge that it's possible that the pre-puberty smokers in the study had a hereditary tendency to be obese that only surfaced a few generations downstream.
It is noteworthy that the associations indicated are related to Obesity, it is generally recognized that Obesity is a complex disorder caused by the interplay of genetics, epigenetics, and environmental factors.
It is important to get confirmatory evidence from other studies before we start to create hypotheses.
Scientific Reports report the findings.
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