Extract
Asthma is a major non-communicable disease in children [1]. Pre- and post-natal exposure to tobacco smoke are major risk factors for childhood asthma [1, 2]. While there is evidence that mothers' intrauterine exposure to second-hand smoke is associated with asthma in the offspring [3, 4], there is also increasing concern that fathers who start smoking before completing puberty may elevate the risk of asthma in their offspring [4, 5]. The suggestion is that this may be as a result of epigenetic changes to sperm precursor (stem) cells during gonadal maturation [4, 5]. However, this is rather speculative, and as yet little is actually known about whether fathers' passive smoke exposure throughout childhood to puberty is indeed associated with increased asthma risk in their offspring.
Footnotes
This manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the European Respiratory Journal. It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJ online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article.
Conflicts of interest: M.J.A holds investigator initiated grants from Pfizer, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Sanofi and GSK for unrelated research. He has undertaken an unrelated consultancy and received assistance with conference attendance from Sanofi. He has also received a speaker's fee from GSK. The rest of the authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
- Received February 8, 2022.
- Accepted August 4, 2022.
- Copyright ©The authors 2022. For reproduction rights and permissions contact permissions{at}ersnet.org
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