Fathers under psychological stress are more likely to have kids with high blood sugar compared to their unstressed counterparts, a new study in mice has found.
Fathers under psychological stress are more likely to have kids with high blood sugar compared to their unstressed counterparts, a new study in mice has found.
The study suggests that a male’s life experience can be passed down through more than his genetic code alone. Researchers link this difference to an epigenetic change in the stressed dad’s sperm. Researchers confined male mice in plastic tubes for two hours a day, for two weeks, to induce stress. Afterwards, the animals’ glucose levels were increased, but the mice gained weight more slowly and had increased levels of stress hormones called glucocorticoids in their blood. These mice were then mated with females that had not been confined, and their resulting offspring had higher blood glucose than normal. “Paternal psychological stress can result in hyperglycemia in offspring in mice,” said Xiaoying Li from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China. The root of the increased blood sugar was in a gene called Sfmbt2. When a male mouse is immobilised daily in a plastic tube, the spike of glucocorticoids causes extra methyl groups to be added to the Sfmbt2 gene in his sperm. The epigenetic reprogramming from stress was surprising, researchers said.
