Men, beware! Using cocaine at the time of conceiving could put your son at risk of memory loss

(Image for representational purposes only)

New Delhi: Fathers don't just contribute their genes to their sons, if that's what you thought. There are some habits that may impact their offspring in a negative way.

Turns out that men who indulge in cocaine-use at the time of conceiving a child, may leverage their son's risk of developing learning disabilities and memory loss, a study has found.

The findings revealed that drug abuse by fathers may affect their male child's cognitive development and learning.

"The results suggest that the sons of male cocaine addicts may be at risk for learning deficits," said R. Christopher Pierce, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

In the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, sons of male rats that consumed cocaine for an extended period of time could not remember the location of items in their surroundings and had impaired synaptic plasticity in hippocampus – a brain region critical for learning and spatial navigation in humans and rodents.

Further, cocaine use in dads caused epigenetic changes in the brain of their sons, thereby changing the expression of genes important for memory formation.

D-serine, a molecule essential for memory, was depleted in male rats whose father took cocaine and replenishing the levels of D-serine in the sons' hippocampus improved learning in these animals.

In addition, cocaine abuse in dads also broadly altered the chemical marks on histones – proteins – in the brain of their sons, even though the offspring were never exposed to cocaine.

The authors propose that increased expression of the enzyme, driven by changes in the epigenetic landscape, cause the memory problems in the sons of addicted rats.

(With IANS inputs)