Father’s obesity affects offspring’s health?

Npnews24 online : It is widely believed that a mother’s lifestyle impacts health of the offspring, however, one would be surprised to know that even the father’s choices have an effect on it.

The study of DNA from umbilical cord blood leukocytes found that paternal obesity is linked to hypomethylation at offspring’s insulin-like growth factor (IGF2) gene.

The research published in the ‘BMC Medicine’ in 2013 suggested that the father’s lifestyle could be passed onto their by an epigenetic mechanism.

This research and other emerging data are showing that the pre-conceptional health of the father including his body mass index (BMI), are able to impact the status of his child’s DNA. This impact is not due to genetic changes, but rather to epigenetic shifts that determine how the child’s DNA is regulated.

“It is tempting to overemphasize the role of a small number of parents-of-origin expressing genes and to speculate about the effects of modest variation in methylation.