It has already been established that your mother’s diet and weight can have an impact on your wellbeing before you’ve even been born, which makes sense when you think about how you grow and develop inside of her body, and the food she eats directly impacts the nutrition you get as a foetus. However, according to a study published in the journal BMC Medicine, it’s not just your mother’s diet and weight that can affect your wellness, but your father’s can too, even if your mother is completely healthy.
Hypomethylation describes a process where the addition of a methyl group to your cytosine or adenine DNA nucleotides decreases. When this occurs in the gene coding for the Insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) in newborns, there is a higher risk of the babies developing cancer later in life. The researchers found that babies who are born to obese fathers, but not obese mothers, demonstrate hypomethylation of IGF2 in the foetal cells which have been isolated from their cord blood.
For the Newborn Epigenetics Study (NEST) at Duke University Hospital, the team collected information about parental weight and compared it to their newborn’s epigenetic data. You inherit genetic information from your parents, which is stored in your DNA, but epigenetic imprinting, such as DNA methylation, controls how active these genes are. The main importance of IGF2 codes occurs during foetal development, and when this gene is not properly controlled, as happens with DNA hypomethylation, there is a high implication of cancer.
According to Dr Adelheid Soubry, who led this study, ‘During spermatogenesis some regions in the DNA may be sensitive to environmental damage; these effects can be transmitted to the next generation. It is possible that (mal)nutrition or hormone levels in obese fathers, leads to incomplete DNA methylation or to unstable genomic imprinting of sperm cells. Further research is necessary to confirm our findings.’
Dr Cathrine Hoyo from NEST added, ‘In general, epigenetic marks are reprogrammed while sperm and eggs are being formed, and consequently nutrition, lifestyle or environment of the parents at this point in time can have a direct effect on a child’s development and subsequent health.’
Comments are closed.