Exposure to early life trauma can lead to poor physical and mental health in some individuals, which can be passed on to their children. Studies in mice show that at least some of the effects of stress can be transmitted to offspring via environmentally-induced changes in sperm miRNA levels.
A new epigenetics study raises the possibility that the same is true in humans. It shows for the first time that the levels of the same two sperm miRNAs change in both men and mice exposed to early life stress. In mice, the negative effects of stress are transmitted to offspring. The study is published On May 23rd in Translational Psychiatry.
“The study raises the possibility that some of the vulnerability of children is due to Lamarckian type inheritance derived from their parents’ experiences,” said Larry Feig, Ph.D., professor of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology and Neuroscience programs at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts.
[For more on this study by Jessica Paulus, Sc.D., Tufts Medical Center as well as Tufts University School of Medicine and the Sackler School; Virginia Mensah, M.D., formerly in Feig’s lab with Women & Infants Hospital and the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and now with the Reproductive Science Center of New Jersey; Janis Lem, Ph.D., Tufts Medical Center; Lorena Saavedra-Rodriguez, Ph.D., formerly a postdoctoral fellow in Feig’s laboratory at Tufts and now with a biopharmaceutical company; and Adrienne Gentry, D.O. and Kelly Pagidas, M.D., University of Louisville School of Medicine, go to https://scienceblog.com/501100...28ScienceBlog.com%29]
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