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Maternal Exposure to Childhood Abuse is Associated with Mate Selection: Implications for Autism in Offspring.

ABSTRACT: Maternal experience of childhood abuse has been associated with offspring autism. To explore whether familial tendency towards autistic traits-presumably related to genetic predisposition-accounts for this association, we examined whether women who experienced childhood abuse were more likely to select mates with high levels of autistic traits, and whether parental autistic traits accounted for the association of maternal abuse and offspring autism in 209 autism cases and 833 controls. Maternal childhood abuse was strongly associated with high paternal autistic traits (severe abuse, OR = 3.98, 95% CI = 1.26, 8.31). Maternal and paternal autistic traits accounted for 21% of the association between maternal abuse and offspring autism. These results provide evidence that childhood abuse affects mate selection, with implications for offspring health.

SUBMITTER: Roberts AL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7046151 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Maternal Exposure to Childhood Abuse is Associated with Mate Selection: Implications for Autism in Offspring.

Roberts Andrea L AL Lyall Kristen K Weisskopf Marc G MG

Journal of autism and developmental disorders 20170701 7

Maternal experience of childhood abuse has been associated with offspring autism. To explore whether familial tendency towards autistic traits-presumably related to genetic predisposition-accounts for this association, we examined whether women who experienced childhood abuse were more likely to select mates with high levels of autistic traits, and whether parental autistic traits accounted for the association of maternal abuse and offspring autism in 209 autism cases and 833 controls. Maternal ...[more]

PMID: 28393290

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Project description:Offspring of persons exposed to childhood abuse are at higher risk of neurodevelopmental and physical health disparities across the life course. Animal experiments have indicated that paternal environmental stressors can affect sperm DNA methylation and gene expression in an offspring. Childhood abuse has been associated with epigenetic marks in human blood, saliva, and brain tissue, with statistically significant methylation differences ranging widely. However, no studies have examined the association of childhood abuse with DNA methylation in gametes. We examined the association of childhood abuse with DNA methylation in human sperm. Combined physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in childhood was characterized as none, medium, or high. DNA methylation was assayed in 46 sperm samples from 34 men in a longitudinal non-clinical cohort using HumanMethylation450 BeadChips. We performed principal component analysis and examined the correlation of principal components with abuse exposure. Childhood abuse was associated with a component that captured 6.2% of total variance in DNA methylation (p?<?0.05). Next, we investigated the regions differentially methylated by abuse exposure. We identified 12 DNA regions differentially methylated by childhood abuse, containing 64 probes and including sites on genes associated with neuronal function (MAPT, CLU), fat cell regulation (PRDM16), and immune function (SDK1). We examined adulthood health behaviors, mental health, and trauma exposure as potential mediators of an association between abuse and DNAm, and found that mental health and trauma exposure partly mediated the association. Finally, we constructed a parsimonious epigenetic marker for childhood abuse using a machine learning approach, which identified three probes that predicted high vs. no childhood abuse in 71% of participants. Our results suggested that childhood abuse is associated with sperm DNA methylation, which may have implications for offspring development. Larger samples are needed to identify with greater confidence specific genomic regions differentially methylated by childhood abuse.

Project description:There has been a growing interest in the association between maternal levels of vitamin D during pregnancy and offspring autism. However, whether any associations reflect causal effects is still inconclusive. We used data from a UK-based pregnancy cohort study (Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) comprising 7689 births between 1991 and 1992 with maternal blood vitamin D levels recorded during pregnancy and at least one recorded outcome measure, including autism diagnosis and autism-associated traits. The association between each outcome with seasonal and gestational age-adjusted maternal serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D during pregnancy was estimated using confounder-adjusted regression models. Multiple imputation was used to account for missing data, and restricted cubic splines were used to investigate nonlinear associations. Mendelian randomization was used to strengthen causal inference. No strong evidence of an association between maternal serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D during pregnancy and any offspring autism-associated outcome was found using multivariable regression analysis (autism diagnosis: adjusted OR = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.90-1.06), including with multiple imputation (autism diagnosis: adjusted OR = 0.99, 95% CI = 0.93-1.06), and no evidence of a causal effect was suggested by Mendelian randomization (autism diagnosis: causal OR = 1.08, 95% CI = 0.46-2.55). Some evidence of increased odds of autism-associated traits at lower levels of maternal serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D was found using spline analysis. Our study was potentially limited by low power, particularly for diagnosed autism cases as an outcome. The cohort may not have captured the extreme lows of the distribution of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D, and our analyses may have been biased by residual confounding and missing data. The present study found no strong evidence of a causal link between maternal vitamin D levels in pregnancy and offspring diagnosis or traits of autism.

Dataset Information

Maternal Exposure to Childhood Abuse is Associated with Mate Selection: Implications for Autism in Offspring.

Publications

Maternal Exposure to Childhood Abuse is Associated with Mate Selection: Implications for Autism in Offspring.

Similar Datasets

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