Ancestral Paternal Diet and Risk of Ovarian and Testicular Germ Cell Tumors

BackgroundDietary patterns and sub-optimal nutrition have been shown to be a critical lifestyle factor impacting cancer risk. An individual’s nutrition during critical windows of the lifespan can not only influence their disease outcome but also that of their offspring. Epigenetic alterations have been evidenced as the mechanism for which parental exposures have been associated with disease in the adult offspring. There has is a great deal of evidence for the impact of maternal dietary exposures on offspring’s risk of cancer and emerging evidence for the role of paternal diet prior to conception on risk of disease in the offspring. As such, epigenetic information can be transmitted from one generation to another through germline cells which carry environmental epigenetic memory. Here, we investigated whether a paternal sub-optimal (low protein) diet can epigenetically reprogram the father’s own germline and affect their offspring’s germ cell development and cancer risk ObjectiveThis study seeks to elucida...