HABARI MUBASHARA: Smoking leads to loss of Y chromosomes

In every 1500 elderly men, 8.2% have been found to lack the Y chromosome. This has led to drastic effects whereby most of the men who do not want to undergo medical checkup yet are suffering from this problem, blame their wives and accuse them of being infertile since they cannot give birth to boys. This has resulted in immoral behaviors in the family, with most of these men using this as a scapegoat for engaging in immorality. With their ignorance, these men continue spreading diseases such as STs and even HIV and AIDs.

Most of the families have also ended up breaking up while the women in these families go through a lot of agony and humiliation. The society also points fingers at them and regards them as outcasts, little do they know that the truth solely lays in undertaking a simple medical checkup as illustrated below.

This situation has called for the attention of medical practitioners to advice couples on the need for medical checkup to determine the fertility of each partner and a call for men to quit smoking. This step has been hitting the rock for quite a long time as men still hold their heads high and beat their chests in resistance. Most of them consider smoking as a requirement in joining a clique or a sign that one is a real man. Ego, which has been a priority to most men, has also been a major hindrance to these activities taking place.

According to science, smoking has been found to lead to decreased life expectancy which is 5.5% shorter and three and a half times the rate of cancer. This has however been found to affect men between the ages of 48-93 years. According to a test done on men aged 70 years to test the post zygotic mutation, loss was found to be 2-4-4, which was three times as likely for smokers than non smokers. Loss of the Y chromosome is also determined by the rate of smoking. Men who smoke heavily lose more Y chromosomes than those who do not smoke heavily. This exposes these men to a higher risk of suffering from cancer than their female counterparts who engage in cigarette smoking.

The condition is however reversible if the smokers quit smoking. This is because, the frequency of cells with loss of the Y chromosome is not different from ex-smokers when compared to men who have never smoked. This then tells us that there is a correlation between a common and avoidable risk factor, which is smoking, and the most common human mutation that is the loss of the Y chromosome. Smoking damages the DNA in human beings and the Y chromosome, being one of the smallest chromosomes in the human genome, and mutation-prone, is very vulnerable.