New $2.9 Million NIH Grant Supports Growing Research Connecting Father’s Drinking To Children’s Long-Term Health Issues

Michael Golding’s new research suggests a father’s drinking before conception may influence the child’s risk for developmental disorders, chronic disease, and accelerated aging.

A growing body of research suggests that a father’s health before conception may play a larger role in child development than previously understood — and Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) researchers are working to understand how a father’s drinking before conception may affect offspring health and development.

Dr. Michael Golding, a professor in the VMBS’ Department of Veterinary Physiology & Pharmacology, studies how alcohol exposure may alter biological signals in sperm in ways that affect offspring development and metabolism.  

Through a new, $2.9-million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and supported by Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Golding and his team will expand their research into how parental alcohol exposure may contribute to chronic disease, accelerated aging, and developmental disorders in offspring.

“We want to understand how the memory of paternal alcohol exposure transmits to the children and then how it predisposes them to birth defects and chronic disease later in life,” Golding said.

Expanding Research On Alcohol Exposure And Chronic Disease

The study builds on Golding’s previous research exploring how paternal alcohol exposure contributes to fetal growth restriction and birth defects.

“In this phase, we want to see if dad’s drinking interacts with mom’s drinking to make things worse,” Golding said. “Do these things compound and contribute to worse health outcomes over time for their children?”

A major focus of the project is the mitochondria — the parts of cells responsible for producing energy. Golding’s team believes alcohol-related stress (stress that impacts the body on a cellular level) alters important molecular signals in sperm, disrupting mitochondrial function in offspring and potentially accelerating aging and disease development.

Golding and his team are studying how a father’s alcohol use can alter the biological information passed to his children — without changing their DNA — with the goal of one day finding ways to improve outcomes for those impacted by FASD.

“If your dysfunctional mitochondria represent a flat tire, you’re basically starting off life with a flat tire,” Golding said. “The question is, ‘how far do you get before the car starts to break down?’”

Using Mouse Models To Understand Long-Term Health Effects

Researchers will use mouse models to study how these effects develop over time, allowing scientists to examine aging, metabolism, sleep disruption, inflammation, and cognitive decline much faster than would be possible in humans.

Because mice age rapidly, researchers can observe changes that would otherwise take decades to study in people. Golding said the model allows his team to identify biological warning signs and better understand which health markers may eventually become important in human patients.

“If you try to do this in humans, it would be at least a 30- to 40-year study and it would cost millions of dollars,” Golding said. “The important thing to understand is that if you do these experiments in mice, it helps inform what we need to look for in humans.”

Golding said the findings could eventually help researchers identify warning signs earlier and guide interventions for people affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD).

Implications Beyond Alcohol Exposure

According to Golding, the findings may eventually provide insight into how other environmental stressors — including microplastics and industrial chemicals — influence reproductive health and disease risk across generations.

“Alcohol is the easiest place to start because it’s a known bad guy,” Golding said. “Moving into the distant future, once we get this figured out, we would move on and say, ‘do microplastics do the same thing?’”

Golding hopes the work will ultimately help scientists detect risks earlier in life and develop targeted interventions to improve long-term health outcomes.

“I think there’s a notion that male alcohol use does not have an impact on the offspring, and that’s completely not true,” Golding said. “We know now, even from human clinical studies, that male alcohol use has an adverse effect on child health and development.”