For the study, researchers conducted an analysis of DNA methylation sites using blood samples taken from nearly 16,000 participants including smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers. One group involved in the study were participants in the Framingham Heart Study, who have been followed by researchers since 1971. Smoking was found to impact DNA methylation sites associated with more than one-third of the human genome. After five years without smoking, most of the DNA methylation sites returned to normal, but smoking’s influence on some of these sites persisted for more than three decades.
“Our study has found compelling evidence that smoking has a long-lasting impact on our molecular machinery, an impact that can last more than 30 years,” said Roby Joehanes, PhD, the study’s first author and an instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “The encouraging news is that once you stop smoking, the majority of DNA methylation signals return to never-smoker levels after five years, which means your body is trying to heal itself of the harmful impacts of tobacco smoking.”
The authors said the identification of this genetic imprint could provide researchers with new targets for therapies and new biomarkers to assess the impact of a patient’s smoking history.
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