Maternal Smoking Epigenetically Harms Child Development

April 26, 2016 Bailey Kirkpatrick

Thankfully, smoking is a habit all pregnant women are advised to break. But, surprisingly, this wasn’t always the case, especially in the 1940s and 1950s when doctors endorsed smoking in tobacco advertisements. Tobacco companies even ran ads hinting that pregnant women could smoke as a way to calm their nerves. With the influx of research on the harms of cigarettes, it now seems absurd to think they were ever recommended. A recent study in American Journal of Human Genetics links [more…]

Genotype and Womb Environment Epigenetically Influence Babies’ Development

May 6, 2014 Bailey Kirkpatrick

A multitude of studies support that the quality of a child’s environment in the womb significantly influences health and development over his or her lifetime. Scientists at the University of Southampton, UK and National University of Singapore have analyzed epigenetic marks on DNA in order to determine how much a baby’s development in the womb is dictated by his or her genotype compared to the mother’s mental and physical health. In the study published in Genome Research, scientists used samples [more…]

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