Did blacksmithing genes cause my asthma ?

[yaf_user681_61477]

Something my sister said to me when we were little stuck in my mind , she said that grandad was a blacksmith. I was looking up stuff about asthma online and one site said that asthmatics were known to hold some muscles in their body rigidly tense without realising that they were doing it. I have had these muscular tensions all my life and just considered them part and parcel of being asthmatic , i have them in my arms soulders and abdomen and my right foot which causes me to dig my big toe into the ground when i walk. Most of the time i'm oblivious to these muscular tensions. I also found out online that some of our genes are passed from our granparents. To cut a long story short i was walking to work a few years ago thinking about these muscular tensions when i remembered what my sister said to me about grandad being a blacksmith and wondered if there was a connection. When i got home i decided to copy the physical movements of a blacksmith at work , so using a bag of sugar because it approximates the weight of a blacksmiths hammer and gripping my bicycle pump as a blacksmith would grip his tongs i began raising the bag of sugar as a blacksmith would raise his hammer. After a while i noticed that all the muscles i was using to do this were the very same muscles i had kept rigidly tense all my life and i have never been near a blacksmiths forge , i was even digging my big right toe into the ground to gain purchase to raise the 'hammer'. When i looked up my family tree on a geneology website my great great granfather was indeed a blacksmith. so i think that he passed these muscular tensions onto my grandfather who had asthma and he passed them onto me through my mother. So i call blacksmithing my genetic occupation ! If any other asthmatics have researched their family tree have a look and see if there are any blacksmiths that contributed to your genetic make-up and let me know. should be interesting

[Hidden]

I'm not sure that this would make sense. Let me explain my thinking and then if you have a counter thought then cool - i'd be curious!nnSo firstly, I'm assuming you're happy with the concept that traits acquired during our lifetimes do not pass onto our children. This theory has been tested before but the greatest test of this theory is the practice of male circumcision in Judaism - for generation after generation this has been done, and yet there is no evidence of this being passed onto offspring. So if you're saying that ""because I inherited muscle tension I have asthma"" then that doesn't work, its not how traits are inherited. (this has been very thoroughly discredited, however if you're interested the wiki article is reasonable en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inher... you're not saying that then this is my thought. Strong muscles don't tend to get tense, thats why if you have back pain from muscle tension then they reccomend strengthening those muscles through physio (and strengthening them in the right way, pain from breathing is usually from muscles being used in odd ways to make breathing feel like less work at the time). If your grandparents made successful careers as Blacksmiths, (in any inheritable way) then it woud be surely due to them having stronger musces? That would make the tasks easier and therefore them able to work longer? Which, if it were passed on to you, would surely make you *less* likely to get tension and pain than others? nnIf we are assuming any kind of causal link then we'd have to be saying ""those who inherited Blacksmiths strength are less likely to experience muscle tension"" because if you got the tension *despite* having natural predisposition for strong muscles then it would simply be a case of measuring the level of tension which is going to be affected by far too many factors.nnI just can't see how it makes sense in any other way than coincidence (and the fact that, in the way modern people live, LOTS of our muscles are used 'incorrectly; resulting in the vast majority of adults having muscle tension, and asthmatics more so, and SOME of us have to decend from Blacksmiths - it not being that uncommon a job!