Asthma is considered to be a severe public health problem for which children having a mother who smoked during her pregnancy are mostly predisposed to develop. Virender K. Rehan and his colleagues at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) exposed pregnant rats to nicotine. They discovered that this group or rats is at an increased risk of this condition. The study, entitled “Perinatal Nicotine-Induced Transgenerational Asthma” is published in the Articles in Press section of the American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology.
The study authors found that the great-grandchildren of the rat mothers exposed to nicotine were significantly more likely to have signs of asthma on the lung and windpipe tests compared to those descended from mothers who received the placebo. Those great-grandchildren of the nicotine-exposed moms had lungs that narrowed more easily when exposed to an asthma provocative challenge and windpipes that contracted more readily.
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