The Bad Daddy Factor

[SoCalDem]

http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/the-bad-daddy-factor-25764/


The Bad Daddy Factor

Drinking, smoking, taking prescription meds or failing to eat a balanced diet can influence the health of men’s future children.

By Emily Anthes


The fathers weren’t supposed to matter. But in the mid-1960s, pharmacologist Gladys Friedler was making all sorts of strange findings. She discovered that when she gave morphine to female rats, it altered the development of their future offspring — rat pups that hadn’t even been conceived yet. What’s more, even these rats’ grandchildren seemed to have problems. In an effort to understand the unexpected result, she made a fateful decision: She would see what happened when she put male rodents on the opiate. So she shot up the rat daddies with morphine, waited a few days, and then mated them with healthy, drug-free females. Their pups, to Friedler’s utter shock, were profoundly abnormal. They were underweight and chronic late bloomers, missing all their developmental landmarks. “It made no sense,” she recalls today. “I didn’t understand it.”

For the next several decades, Friedler tried to understand this finding, ultimately assembling a strong case that morphine, alcohol and other substances could prompt male rodents to father defective offspring. There was only one problem: No one believed her. Colleagues questioned her results — her former adviser urged her to abandon the research — and she struggled to find funding and get her results published. “It didn’t occur to me that you’re not supposed to look at fathers’ roles in birth defects,” Friedler says. “I initially was not aware of the resistance. I was one of the people who was actually naïve enough to work in this field.”

Over the last half-century, as scientists learned more and more about how women could safeguard their developing fetuses — skip the vodka, take your folate — few researchers even considered the possibility that men played a role in prenatal health. It would turn out to be a scientific oversight of significant proportions. A critical mass of research now demonstrates that environmental exposures — from paints to pesticides — can cause men to father children with all sorts of abnormalities. Drinking booze, smoking cigarettes, taking prescription medications and even just not eating a balanced diet can influence the health of men’s future kids. In the several decades since Friedler started her work, the idea that chemicals in a man’s environment can influence the health of his future children has, she says, “moved from lunatic fringe to cutting edge.”

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[highplainsdem]

1. K&R

[johnroshan]

2. wow.. Now that can cause a stir.

:popcorn:

[fishwax]

3. very interesting

:kick:

[Alcibiades]

4. Most of the responsibility for reproduction has been

imposed on women, to include responsibility for birth defects. I have a half-brother who has Downs. My stepmother was only 30 when he was born, and did not drink (her father was an alcoholic, and so she was and is a teetotaler). Meanwhile, my dad used to spray agent orange in Vietnam, and actually drank a couple of cups of it when some of the guys who had been sprayed by it complained to him. Could there be a link to the Downs, given that this was at least six years after the exposure? Nah, the government told him it was safe. Meanwhile, I went to school with the kids of many Vietnam veterans, and three of the students in my year alone were missing body parts-fingers on one or both hands, and, in one case, a whole lower leg. Always wondered about that.

Spermatogenesis is something of an amazing process. Males are the great genetic randomizers of the animal kingdom, and we know there's a lot that can go wrong. Hundreds of millions of gametes produced daily, and they are all supposed to be perfect? Nah, if anything goes wrong, it must have something to do with the mother's eggs, even if she's apparently young and healthy. Medical doctors can be so stupid.

This article makes me quite glad that I happened to father my kids at a time when I wasn't drinking, smoking or using drugs.

[ohheckyeah]

5. I think this is very important information.

It's important for men to know that what they do and are exposed to can affect their off spring and it's important for women to know that not everything that goes wrong in the womb is their responsibility.

[Hannah Bell]

6. more crap research