Friday, August 24, 2012

Male Smokers Can Also Affect Future Offspring


"Male Smokers Can Affect Future Offspring" The Arizona Republic (2012, July 6), p. H1.

"Children of male smokers can inherit their fathers' damaged DNA, which could increase their risk of genetic disease"

Majia here: I'm posting this now because it echoes the finding I published a couple of days ago about a positive correlation between older fathers and autism rates.

http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/autism-and-radiation.html

In my post, "Autism and Radiation" I argued a hypothesis that older fathers are more likely to have kids with autism because their bodies are less effective at fixing DNA damage and they have also accumulated more DNA damage because of their age.

Children inherit all of their parents' germ-line (i.e., reproductive cell) DNA damage.

Low-levels of ionizing radiation has been proven to cause germ-line cell damage inherited by offspring in mice.

See my post above for more details on autism and radiation.

For a detailed discussion of how radiation damages the human genome, please see these posts:

BURDENING THE SPECIES WITH GENETIC MUTATIONS: WE ARE ALREADY DOING IT

http://majiasblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/mutations-germ-line-mosaicism.html


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