Transgenerational effects of chemotherapy: Both male and female children born to women exposed to chemotherapy have fewer children

The Impact of Early-Life Exposures on Women's Reproductive Health in Adulthood

Purpose of Review

To review the effects of early-life, preconception, and prior-generation exposures on reproductive health in women.

Recent Findings

Women’s early-life factors can affect reproductive health by contributing to health status or exposure level on entering pregnancy. Alternately, they can have permanent effects, regardless of later-life experience. Nutrition, social class, parental smoking, other adverse childhood experiences, environmental pollutants, infectious agents, and racism and discrimination all affect reproductive health, even if experienced in childhood or in utero. Possible transgenerational effects are now being investigated through three- or more-generation studies. These effects occur with mechanisms that may include direct exposure, behavioral, endocrine, inflammatory, and epigenetic pathways.

Summary

Pregnancy is increasingly understood in a life course perspective, but rigorously testing hypotheses on early-life effects is still difficult. In order to improve the health outcomes of all women, we need to expand our toolkit of methods and theory.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40471-021-00279-0.

Impact of chemotherapy on subsequent generations

Chemotherapy is extensively used in healthcare and its usage is only increasing. Since DNA and DNA modifiers (epigenetics) are altered by chemotherapy, the long-term effects in exposed individuals are important to clinicians and researchers. For example, animal studies have shown evidence of both genetic and epigenetic changes in progeny several generations downstream from the initial exposure. At present, there is extremely limited available research in humans but the study of the generational effects of chemotherapy could prove to be significant.