New Study Warns Men Who Smoke Are THREE TIMES More Likely To Have Children With Asthma

We all know smoking is bad for you, and that not smoking – or quitting smoking – is pretty much the greatest thing you can do for your health. Much has been said about how important it is for expectant mums to avoid smoking in order to keep their babies healthy, but now a brand new study has also shed light on just how damaging it is for baby's health if dad is a smoker. In fact, according to new research from the University of Bergen in Norway, children whose fathers smoked before they were even conceived are more than three times more likely to develop asthma. The reason? Male sperm cells are damaged by nicotine, which turns out is affecting a child's genes – even long after the father might have stopped smoking. And the younger the father when he starts smoking, the worse the effect it will have on his future children. In the study of 24,000 children, researchers found that boys having their first cigarette before the age of 15 put offspring at particular risk. In fact, both the age at which a father first smoke and the time his habit had lasted before starting a family affected the risk, reports the International Journal of Epidemiology. And these factors held true after taking into account the number of cigarettes smoked, and the years since quitting smoking. With mothers, interestingly, the scientists found that the risk of child asthma increased only if the mother smoked around the time of her pregnancy, it not being of medical importance to her future children if she had smoked when she was younger.

This is what Professor Cecilie Svanes of the University of Bergen in Norway, had to say about the findings to the Daily Mail:

"Offspring with a father who smoked only prior to conception had over three times more early onset asthma than those whose father had never smoked. There is growing evidence from animal studies for so-called epigenetic programming, a mechanism whereby the father's environment before conception could impact on the health of future generations."