This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.
Tuesday 24 Nov 2015 - 17:10 Makkah mean time-12-2-1437
 Baltimore, Maryland (IINA) - Smoking during pregnancy could leave damaging markers in baby's blood for at least five years after birth, experts have warned, Mail Online news reported.
The new US research has shown blood taken from children up to the age of five contains molecular evidence about whether or not their mothers smoked during pregnancy.
The findings offer strong evidence that environmental exposures in the womb remain in the body and potentially affect someone's health for years after birth.
The study also suggests that it may prove possible to detect exposures to other potential toxins during pregnancy, which are less evident, including chemicals in plastics, undetected infections or contaminants in drinking water.
Ultimately, researchers said they hope to be able to link these exposures to chronic diseases, such as autism, obesity or heart disease to better understand how diseases develop and possibly help prevent them.
Dr Margaret Daniele Fallin, study leader at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, said: 'If you have a blood sample, you may be able to ask research questions that you could never ask before.
'Smoking is one thing. But, if it turns out to be possible for other kinds of exposures, this could be a paradigm shift.
'We have long known that the body is an accumulator of past exposures - evidence of lead exposure lives on in our bones, for example.
'But we did not know that something as easy to collect as blood could contain evidence of exposures not only during your life but prenatally.
'That's what makes this so compelling.'
To arrive at their findings, Dr Fallin and her colleagues analyzed epigenetics molecules that are not part of the DNA sequence, but sit on top of it and regulate which genes are turned on and off, when and where in the body.
Two years ago, another group of researchers looked at newborn cord blood, and discovered that the amount of an epigenetic mark, known as DNA methylation, at 26 locations on the genome, was correlated with whether that baby's mother had smoked during pregnancy.
For this new study, Dr Fallin's team took the experiment one step further.
They tested the blood of 531 preschoolers from six different sites in the US, and also spoke to the children's mothers about whether or not they had smoked during pregnancy.
Researchers analyzed methylation patterns at the same 26 locations in the genome, and found that 81 per cent of the time their test was able to accurately predict prenatal smoking exposure.
It was not previously known whether this epigenetic signature would still be around as many as five years later, but the blood still contained this molecular memory.
SM/IINA
|
No comments:
Post a Comment