Did Your Grandmother Smoke? She May Have Caused Your Asthma

Even if your mother doesn’t smoke, if your grandmother enjoyed a cigarette every now and then, she may have put your wellbeing at risk. This is according to two Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute researchers who say that you’re more likely to develop asthma if your grandmother smoked.

In the Review of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, John S. Torday and Virender K. Rehan reported the results of Dr Rehan’s rat studies, in which he exposed pregnant rodents to nicotine, the active ingredient in cigarettes. Dr Rehan, a professor of paediatrics who has published numerous studies on newborn baby lung health – including other studies on the link between smoking and asthma – found that the litters of the “smoking” rats had a greater chance of developing asthma, and the same was true for their pups when those rats grew up, even if they were not exposed to nicotine.

For years, studies have shown that if your mother smoked, your wellness is more likely to be affected by asthma. Over a decade ago, for instance, Dr. Erika von Mutius published a study in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which demonstrated that ‘exposure to tobacco smoke in utero significantly increases asthma risk.’ Hence, doctors encourage mothers-to-be to give up smoking, because it’s easy to see that your baby’s developing lungs are affected by direct content in the womb with the nicotine in the your cigarettes.

This new claim is a little more controversial, because claiming that a grandmother’s smoking can affect a grandchild’s chances of developing asthma challenge some established opinions about genetic inheritance. According to Torday and Rehan, nicotine can actually change the genetic material of the developing baby so when she grows up, she can still pass on the susceptibility to asthma to her own child even if she doesn’t smoke.

Torday and Rehan wrote, ‘12% of women in the USA continue to smoke during pregnancy, resulting in the birth of at least 400,000 smoke-exposed infants yearly in the USA alone.’ Therefore, if the result of their new “smoking grandmother” study hold true, American women who smoke during pregnancy, and women here in the UK, may be harming not just their own children but future generations.