Toxic exposure creates disease risk over 20 generations, epigenetic inheritance study suggests

A single exposure to a toxic fungicide during pregnancy can increase the risk of disease for 20 subsequent generations—with inherited health problems worsening many generations after exposure. Those are the findings of a new Washington State University study of rats that expands the understanding of how long the intergenerational effects of toxic exposure may last, as they are passed down through alterations in reproductive cells. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was co-authored by WSU biologist Michael Skinner, who has been studying this "epigenetic transgenerational inheritance" of disease for two decades.