Transgenerational Impacts of Paternal Stress on Offspring Mental Health: Epigenetic Mechanisms and Therapeutic Interventions

Grant number: 1083468 | Funding period: 2015 - 2017

Completed

Abstract

We are following up the extraordinary, almost ‘Lamarckian’, discovery that environmental influences on fathers can affect their offspring via ‘epigenetic’ changes to the sperm. We will explore mechanisms whereby increased levels of paternal stress can cause behavioural changes in the offspring, which are relevant to depression and anxiety disorders, and how positive environmental factors, including physical activity, may induce beneficial effects. This will have major public health implications.

Related publications (6)

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Novel approaches to alcohol rehabilitation: Modification of stress-responsive brain regions through environmental enrichment

TY Pang, AJ Hannan, AJ Lawrence

2019-02-01

Relapse remains the most prominent hurdle to successful rehabilitation from alcoholism. The neural mechanisms underlying relapse a..

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Elevated paternal glucocorticoid exposure modifies memory retention in female offspring

S Yeshurun, J Rogers, AK Short, T Renoir, TY Pang, AJ Hannan

2017-09-01

Recent studies have demonstrated that behavioral traits are subject to transgenerational modification by paternal environmental fa..

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Paternal environmental enrichment transgenerationally alters affective behavioral and neuroendocrine phenotypes

S Yeshurun, AK Short, TW Bredy, TY Pang, AJ Hannan

2017-03-01

Recent studies have demonstrated that paternal stress in rodents can result in modification of offspring behavior. Environmental e..

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Exercise alters mouse sperm small noncoding RNAs and induces a transgenerational modification of male offspring conditioned fear and anxiety

AK Short, S Yeshurun, R Powell, VM Perreau, A Fox, JH Kim, TY Pang, AJ Hannan

2017-01-01

There is growing evidence that the preconceptual lifestyle and other environmental exposures of a father can significantly alter t..

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What's wrong with my mouse cage? Methodological considerations for modeling lifestyle factors and gene-environment interactions in mice

C Mo, T Renoir, AJ Hannan

2016-05-30

The mechanistic understanding of lifestyle contributions to disease has been largely driven by work in laboratory rodent models us..

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Elevated paternal glucocorticoid exposure alters the small noncoding RNA profile in sperm and modifies anxiety and depressive phenotypes in the offspring

AK Short, KA Fennell, VM Perreau, A Fox, MK O'bryan, JH Kim, TW Bredy, TY Pang, AJ Hannan

2016-01-01

Recent studies have suggested that physiological and behavioral traits may be transgenerationally inherited through the paternal l..

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