Carleton Adjunct Professor, Dr. Carole Yauk, and her colleagues at Health Canada and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have published a paper in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), showing that male reproductive success can be affected by passive smoking. The paper, entitled “Sidestream tobacco smoke is a male germ cell mutagen,” was published on July 18, 2011 in the online Early Edition of PNAS. It can be viewed at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/07/13/1106896108.full.pdf+html. The paper is a featured article of PNAS, which made a press release that can be viewed on ‘PNAS Media Summaries for July 18–July 22’.
This is a copy of the press release for this article made by PNAS. It has already been taken up by news agencies around the world .
Passive smoking might affect male reproductive success. Researchers have found that passive smoking leads to genetic mutations in mouse sperm. More than a third of men of reproductive age in the United States are smokers, who, previous studies have established, are at a high risk of suffering sperm defects, including sperm immobility and DNA damage. Those abnormalities can lead to spontaneous abortions and birth defects. Francesco Marchetti and colleagues attempted to answer a longstanding question facing public health experts: Does passive smoking lead to heritable genetic changes? For two weeks the authors exposed male mice to a major component of passive tobacco smoke, called sidestream smoke, which contains dozens of known carcinogens. Six weeks later, the authors performed genetic analysis on sperm from the mice, and found that mice exposed to sidestream smoke had a high rate of mutations in a region of the sperm DNA called a simple tandem repeat, an established marker for heritable mutations. By contrast, sidestream smoke did not increase the rate of genetic changes in the red blood cells of the mice, suggesting that sperm may be particularly sensitive to the mutagenic effects of second hand smoke. Active smoking by fathers-to-be can place the offspring at a heightened risk of childhood cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The authors’ findings suggest that passive smoking might lead to similar negative consequences.
Article #11-06896: “Sidestream tobacco smoke is a male germ cell mutagen,” by Francesco Marchetti et al.