Environmental exposure early in development plays a role in susceptibility to disease in later life. Here, we demonstrate that prolonged febrile seizures induced by exposure of rat pups to a hyperthermic environment enhance seizure susceptibility not only in these hyperthermia-treated rats but also in their future offspring, even if the offspring never experience febrile seizures. This transgenerational transmission was intensity-dependent and was mainly from mothers to their offspring. The transmission was associated with DNA methylation. Thus, our study supports a "Lamarckian"-like mechanism of pathogenesis and the crucial role of epigenetic factors in neurological conditions.
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Wu et al. (2017) studied this question.
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