The professor of neurology at Amsterdam University claims that the chance of having a child who is gay can be determined by a range of factors including how stressed pregnant women are as well as whether they smoke and their exposure to amphetamines.
'Pregnant women suffering from stress are also more likely to have homosexual children of both genders because their raised level of the stress hormone cortisol affects the production of foetal sex hormones,' Swaab said reported The Sunday Times.
The development of the brain is such a delicate process during pregnancy that Swaab believes any small changes can have a major impact on a person's life.
A key example of this was in a study which found that women who took the synthetic estrogen DES when pregnant were more likely to have daughters with bisexual or homosexual tendencies.
The drug was widely prescribed to pregnant women as an anti-miscarriage drug for more than 20 years and researchers found that eight of the 117 DES daughters studied had bisexual or homosexual tendencies, while none did in a carefully selected 117-woman control group.
Research has previously found that boys with older brothers are more likely to be homosexual than those with sisters, younger brothers or no siblings at all.
For every older brother a man has, the chances of him being gay increases by 33 per cent, according to Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard.
'Even in women who drink just a glass of wine a day we see effects (such as) lower IQ and hyperactivity.'
Other links made in the study suggest that exposure to traffic fumes and industrial air pollution can dramatically increase a mother's chances of having a child with autism.
The suggestion that the lifestyle of an expectant mother an affect their offspring's development has been put forward in Professor Dick Swaab's new book We Are Our Brains
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