This is a weird subject: People study the darndest things!

Post Reply New Topic

I came across an article this morning that talked about the relationship between sperm and the Civil War. What a strange topic to research!

There is a growing body of literature demonstrating the intuitive connection between a mother’s health during pregnancy and the health of their children, but little on what effect the father may play. A study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science uses data on civil war veterans to begin to pry open the door to those answers.

The researchers look at Union soldiers who were not prisoners of war (POW) as well as POWs in two time periods. The first, from the beginning of the war till July of 1863, when POWs were freely exchanged between the sides. In the second period, POWs were not exchanged as negotiations broke down and as their number increased they suffered significant food shortages. For example, Union records indicated symptoms of scurvy in about 11% of all soldiers, rising to 14% for those soldiers captured before July 1863 increasing to 23% when exchanges were halted and dropping again to 14% when prisoner exchanges were resumed before the end of the war. They had data on all three groups' families; about 2,500 children for the approximately 700 soldiers that were POWs during the exchange or no-exchange period, and 15,000 children for the 5,000 non-POW Union soldiers that were the control.

* At the age of 45, sons of no-exchange POWs 11% more likely to die than the non-POW prisoners and about 9% more likely to die than sons on POWs during the exchange period.
* Sons of non-POWs and exchange POWs were statistically indistinguishable
* Paternal status had no impact of daughters
* Within families, the impact on sons was even greater, sons born after the war to non-exchange POWs died 2.23 fold more quickly than sons of the same father born before the war.
* Paternal POW status had no impact on the son’s socioeconomic status or the family structure.
* The excess mortality found in the POW sons was mainly from a cerebral hemorrhage and perhaps marginally from cancer. There were no excess deaths attributable to suicide or accidents among the sons, although the data here is very limited.

So where does this lead? The author of this research pointed to:

They concluded that the effect they identified was a sex-specific transmission of epigenetic effects and cited a similar small study from Sweden that correlated food shortages with epigenetic influences on the mortality of sons, not daughters.

So I guess if there is any point to this story, it is that males must eat well if they expect to have thriving sons.

Source: Sperm’s Baggage: What They Bring To The Party
URL available at: https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/10/15/sperm’s-baggage-what-they-bring-party%C2%A0-13507