A new animal study by a team at the Ohio State University suggests that a parent’s exposure to dirty air before conception may result in cardiac dysfunction in adult male offspring. The open-access paper is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association . The study used an in vivo mouse model of preconception exposure to PM 2.5 to investigate the adverse cardiac effects on male offspring. The results revealed that the preconception period represents a “critical window” for the development of cardiac dysfunction in the offspring at adulthood. These data indicate that environmental exposures may cause adaptations to the germ cells that could provide the mechanistic basis for the cardiovascular dysfunction observed. We found that these offspring had a variety of heart problems during the prime of their lives and the effects were so robust that it was somewhat shocking. —senior author Loren Wold, director of biomedical […]