Toxin Exposure May Impact Great Grandchildren and Cause Them to be More Susceptible to Stress

It turns out that exposure to toxins could impact children generations later. Scientists have discovered that female rates whose great grandparents were exposed to vinclozolin became far more vulnerable to stress.

Vinclozolin is what is known as an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) and is a fungicide commonly used by farmers to treat fruits and vegetables. These chemicals can be found in both natural and human-made materials.

In order to test the effects of stress on rats, the researchers confined some of them to soft, warm cylinders for six hours a day for three weeks. Then, the researchers tested the brain chemistry, brain function, gene expression and behavior of the rats as adults.

In the end, they found that for female rats, ancestral exposure to vinclozolin alone or stress during the animals' adolescence alone had negligible effects on the rats' hormonal balance and behavior. Yet the combination of ancestral exposure and stress caused the female rats to have dramatically higher levels of a stress hormone.

"These results should concern us all because we have been exposed to endocrine disrupting chemicals for decades and we all go through natural challenges in life," said David Crews, lead author of the new study, in a news release. "Those challenges are now being perceived differently because of this ancestral exposure to environmental contamination."

The findings reveal a bit more about the effects of EDCs. In fact, the researchers found that what's being changed with the EDCs is the way specific genes are expressed. This could mean that these chemicals can increase risk in future generations for human illnesses such as autism, obesity and cardiovascular disease.

The findings are published in the journal Endocrinology.