Abstract
Recent research using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) demonstrated an association between maternal grandmother smoking in pregnancy and the autistic traits of impaired social communication and repetitive behaviour in granddaughters but not grandsons, but of paternal grandmother smoking and early development of myopia in the grandchild. Here we investigate whether grandmaternal smoking in pregnancy is associated with intolerance to loud sounds. ALSPAC collected information during the index pregnancy from the study parents on the smoking habits, social and other features of their own parents. Maternal report when the child was aged 6 and 13 included hating loud sounds; at age 11 the child was tested for volume preference for listening to music through headphones. Statistical analysis compared results for grandchildren in relation to whether a parent had been exposed in utero to maternal smoking, adjusted for their grandparents’ social and demographic attributes. We hypothesised that there would be sex differences in the effects of grandmaternal prenatal smoking, based on previous intergenerational studies. For 6-year-old children maternal report of intolerance to loud noise was more likely in grandsons if the maternal grandmother had smoked [adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 1.27; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.03,1.56; P = 0.025], but less likely in girls [AOR 0.82; 95%CI 0.63,1.07] Pinteraction <0.05. If the paternal grandmother had smoked the grandchildren were less likely to be intolerant, especially girls. The objective measure of choice of volume for music through headphones showed that grandsons of both maternal and paternal smoking grandmothers were less likely to choose high volumes compared with granddaughters (P<0.05). In line with our prior hypothesis of sex differences, we showed that grandsons were more intolerant of loud sounds than granddaughters particularly at age 6, and this was confirmed by objective measures at age 11.
Highlights
The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort was established in 1991 to study developmental phenotypic variation across the local population in relation to inherited DNA variants and a wide range of dietary, social and environmental exposures. [1] Maternal exposures during and before the study pregnancy was one interest during the first decade, being relevant to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis [2,3] and the emergence of environmental epigenetics [4,5]
Since the launch of human genome wide association studies (GWAS) in 2007 [8] the mainstream view of the inheritance of complex traits and multifactorial diseases is that the heritability will eventually be explained by the sum total of common and increasingly rare DNA sequence variations inherited by the individual, plus ‘de novo’ mutations arising early in development
The proportion of study pregnancies that resulted in a child for whom the questions on loud sound intolerance were answered at ages 6 and 13 are shown in S1 Table, together with the proportion who attended the clinic at age 11 and performed the listening test
Summary
The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) birth cohort was established in 1991 to study developmental phenotypic variation across the local population in relation to inherited DNA variants and a wide range of dietary, social and environmental exposures. [1] Maternal exposures during and before the study pregnancy was one interest during the first decade, being relevant to the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis [2,3] and the emergence of environmental epigenetics [4,5]. Since the launch of human genome wide association studies (GWAS) in 2007 [8] the mainstream view of the inheritance of complex traits and multifactorial diseases is that the heritability will eventually be explained by the sum total of common and increasingly rare DNA sequence variations inherited by the individual, plus ‘de novo’ mutations arising early in development. The last decade has seen mammalian evidence of non-DNA-sequence-based inheritance induced by parental/ ancestral experiences [13]. These effects are called intergenerational if the exposure (or importantly the organism’s response to it, e.g. response to DNA damage) could have reached the germ cells leading to the generation(s), or transgenerational if this is not the case.
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