Washington, Aug 31 (ANI): Parents beware. Your anxiety and stresses could alter your kids' genes permanently, says a new study.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of British Columbia found that parents' stress leaves an imprint on their sons' or daughters' genes - that lasts into adolescence and may affect how these genes are expressed later in life.
Michael S. Kobor, a UBC associate professor of medical genetics, and colleagues measured methylation patterns in cheek cell DNA collected recently from more than 100 adolescents.
They then compared the DNA patterns to data collected by the University of Wisconsin researchers from 1990 and 1991 when the teens were just infants.
At the time, their parents were asked to report on their stress levels, including depression, family strife, parenting issues and financial worries.
Kobor's team found that teens whose mothers reported higher stress during infancy had similar methylation patterns.
A total of 139 genes were found to correlate with stress levels reported by mothers.
They also discovered that a mother's stress apparently affects adolescents more than the father's. Only 31 genes correlated with fathers who reported stress during their kids' preschool years.
"To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration, using carefully collected longitudinal data, that parental adversity during a child's first years leads to discernible changes in his or her 'epigenome,' measurable more than a decade later," said Kobor, a scientist at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child and Family Research Institute (CFRI), and a Mowafaghian Scholar at the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP).
The team also found that fathers' stress level is more strongly associated with DNA methylation in daughters, while mothers' stress level has an effect with both boys and girls.
The study is published online in the journal Child Development. (ANI)
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