A growing body of research suggests that a father's health before conception may play a larger role in child development than previously understood - and researchers are working to understand how a father's drinking before conception may affect offspring health and development.
Dr. Michael Golding, a professor in the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology, studies how alcohol exposure may alter biological signals in sperm in ways that affect offspring development and metabolism.
Through a new $2.9 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and supported by Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Golding and his team will expand their research into how parental alcohol exposure may contribute to chronic disease, accelerated aging and developmental disorders in offspring.
We want to understand how the memory of paternal alcohol exposure transmits to the children and then how it predisposes them to birth defects and chronic disease later in life."
Dr. Michael Golding, Professor, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology
Expanding research on alcohol exposure and chronic disease
The study builds on Golding's previous research exploring how paternal alcohol exposure contributes to fetal growth restriction and birth defects.
"In this phase, we want to see if dad's drinking interacts with mom's drinking to make things worse," Golding said. "Do these things compound and contribute to worse health outcomes over time for their children?"
A major focus of the project is the mitochondria - the parts of cells responsible for producing energy. Golding's team believes alcohol-related stress (stress that impacts the body on a cellular level) alters important molecular signals in sperm, disrupting mitochondrial function in offspring and potentially accelerating aging and disease development.
Golding and his team are studying how a father's alcohol use can alter the biological information passed to his children - without changing their DNA - with the goal of one day finding ways to improve outcomes for those impacted by FASD.
"If your dysfunctional mitochondria represent a flat tire, you're basically starting off life with a flat tire," Golding said. "The question is, 'how far do you get before the car starts to break down?'"
Implications beyond alcohol exposure
Golding said the findings could help researchers identify warning signs earlier and guide interventions for people affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and may eventually provide insight into how other environmental stressors - including microplastics and industrial chemicals - influence reproductive health and disease risk across generations.
"Alcohol is the easiest place to start because it's a known bad guy," Golding said. "Moving into the distant future, once we get this figured out, we would move on and say, 'do microplastics do the same thing?'"
Golding hopes the work will ultimately help scientists detect risks earlier in life and develop targeted interventions to improve long-term health outcomes.
"I think there's a notion that male alcohol use does not have an impact on the offspring, and that's completely not true," Golding said. "We know now, even from human clinical studies, that male alcohol use has an adverse effect on child health and development."
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