A new study from the University of Pennsylvania finds that stress experienced by a father during preadolescence or adulthood directly affects his offspring's brain development.
Many studies have been conducted on how a mother's activities during pregnancy like undergoing stress, the use of drugs, drinking; etc affects her offspring but little has been known about a father's effect on his offspring. However, a new study conducted by researchers led by Tracy L. Bale, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and the School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Animal Biology, looks to change that.
The new research found that stress experienced by a father, during both preadolescence and adulthood affects his sperm, which in turn affects the brain development of his offspring, leading to other mental disorders. The study was conducted on mice.
"It didn't matter if dads were going through puberty or in adulthood when stressed before they mated. We've shown here for the first time that stress can produce long-term changes to sperm that reprogram the offspring HPA stress axis regulation," said Bale in a news release. "These findings suggest one way in which paternal-stress exposure may be linked to such neuropsychiatric diseases."
For the study, male mice were exposed to six weeks of chronic stress before breeding either throughout puberty or only in adulthood. Researchers found that the offspring of the male mice that underwent stress displayed significantly blunted levels of the stress hormone corticosterone in response to stress. They noted that this reduced physiological stress response may reflect some adaptive evolutionary benefit passed on to offspring to ensure survival in what is expected to be a more stressful environment.
Authors of the study noted that male mice were ideal to conduct the study on as they do not participate in offspring rearing, meaning any external factors outside of germ-cell formation are essentially eliminated.
The findings are published in a new preclinical study in the Journal of Neuroscience.
