Abstract—The stress an individual experiences never affects only that person. This impact can also extend to their biological children. You may wonder how stress experienced by the previous generation can pass down to children through bloodlines? A growing number of studies have identified a key entry point to this question: in the human body’s germ cells responsible for reproduction, namely sperm and eggs, there exists a set of information that does not alter the inherent sequence of DNA but can regulate the activation or silencing of genes—this is epigenetic information, specifically including DNA methylation, non-coding RNA, and chromatin structure. All these types of information can be altered by the environmental and psychological stress a person experiences. However, not all this stress-altered epigenetic information is naturally passed on to the next generation. Whether it can be transmitted is jointly influenced by several intertwined factors: first, the specific type of the epigenetic modification itself; second, which developmental stage the germ cell is in when these modifications occur; and a core condition, the epigenetic reprogramming mechanism that acts on these markers—the physiological process that erases most old epigenetic markers and resets the state for the new life during the development of embryos and germ cells. The combination of these factors determines whether the changes caused by stress can cross this erasure threshold and be passed on to children. This review collates all relevant current research, organizes the mediating factors that affect whether stress-induced germline epigenetic changes can be inherited, and discusses several potential intervention directions—blocking this transmission by adjusting nutrition, changing lifestyles, or using molecular methods—to minimize the impact of parental stress on children’s health. Existing research still has many limitations: the models used in different experiments vary too widely, with inconsistent experimental animals, stress application methods, and detected indicators, so results cannot be arbitrarily combined and compared; previous findings obtained from experimental subjects such as animals lack support from human experimental data, and cannot be directly applied to humans; another long-unresolved problem is the inability to distinguish between intergenerational effects and true transgenerational epigenetic inheritance—in simple terms, it is impossible to tell whether a child’s abnormalities are only directly inherited from their parents, or can actually be passed down to grandchildren or even later generations who never encountered the original stress. Based on these limitations, future research first needs to identify stable, replicable heritable molecular changes, confirm which changes can truly cross the reprogramming threshold and be passed down through generations, and then develop effective, accessible intervention methods to reduce the impact of parental stress on offspring.
 
Keywords—stress, germline, epigenetic inheritance, transgenerational inheritance, preventive strategies

Cite: Yuchen Zhou and Yike Guo, "Stress-induced Germline Epigenetic Inheritance: Determinants, Challenges, and Preventive Strategies," International Journal of Pharma Medicine and Biological Sciences, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 151-161, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).