Paternal adverse childhood experiences: Associations with infant DNA methylation.
Sarah M MerrillSarah R MooreNicole GladishGerald F GiesbrechtDeborah DeweyChaini KonwarJulia L MacIssacMichael S KoborNicole L LetourneauPublished in: Developmental psychobiology (2021)
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), or cumulative childhood stress exposures, such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction, predict later health problems in both the exposed individuals and their offspring. One potential explanation suggests exposure to early adversity predicts epigenetic modification, especially DNA methylation (DNAm), linked to later health. Stress experienced preconception by mothers may associate with DNAm in the next generation. We hypothesized that fathers' exposure to ACEs also associates with their offspring DNAm, which, to our knowledge, has not been previously explored. An epigenome-wide association study (EWAS) of blood DNAm (n = 45) from 3-month-old infants was regressed onto fathers' retrospective ACEs at multiple Cytosine-phosphate-Guanosine (CpG) sites to discover associations. This accounted for infants' sex, age, ethnicity, cell type proportion, and genetic variability. Higher ACE scores associated with methylation values at eight CpGs. Post-hoc analysis found no contribution of paternal education, income, marital status, and parental postpartum depression, but did with paternal smoking and BMI along with infant sleep latency. These same CpGs also contributed to the association between paternal ACEs and offspring attention problems at 3 years. Collectively, these findings suggested there were biological associations with paternal early life adversity and offspring DNAm in infancy, potentially affecting offspring later childhood outcomes.
Keyphrases
- early life
- dna methylation
- mental health
- genome wide
- high fat diet
- healthcare
- nk cells
- gene expression
- public health
- copy number
- human health
- depressive symptoms
- oxidative stress
- physical activity
- insulin resistance
- emergency department
- air pollution
- type diabetes
- working memory
- cross sectional
- risk assessment
- smoking cessation
- young adults
- angiotensin converting enzyme