News Trauma's Epigenetic Fingerprint Observed In Children Of Holocaust Survivors

[MyPTSD]

The children of traumatized people have long been known to be at increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder, and mood and anxiety disorders. However, according to researchers, there are very few opportunities to examine biologic alterations in the context of a watershed trauma in exposed people and their adult children born after the event.
Dead Link Removed

 

[cat-lady]

Nova had an interesting episode on epigenetics a few years back. They also talked about descendants of famine victims. The info you just posted is probably more recent but there's still some good stuff in that Nova episode. It will come up if you google "Nova epigenentics." I hope this will be helpful in treating people eventually. It would also be interesting if we start to see lawsuits based on mass traumatic events that happened to ancestors and epigenetic symptoms in people living today.

 

[EveHarrington]

Anybody know of any studies done on people who were traumatized in utero? (Damn you Apple, "in utero" is a no-no word? Good lord.) That is, the mother went through trauma while pregnant and the study is on the unborn person------ later in life.

 

[cat-lady]

I don't know about specific studies but I think it can have an effect.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I agree with this information. Both of my children have PTSD except my son has died since so I only have my daughter. Wish I had known this when they were babies.

 

[cat-lady]

So sorry to hear about the loss of your son!

 

[Deleted member 12723]

Thank you @cat-lady much appreciated.:hug:

 

[Anarchy]

Anybody know of any studies done on people who were traumatized in utero?

There have been ongoing studies of the people who were in utero during the Dutch Hunger Winter.

 

[Anarchy]

Errr, before we get excited about this study,
look at the numbers and question whether this is random chance in the sample

The researchers examined blood samples of 32 Holocaust survivors and 22 of their adult children, and Jewish parent-offspring control pairs for methylation of intron 7, a specific region within the FKBP5 gene.

The analysis revealed that both Holocaust survivors and their offspring show epigenetic changes at the same site of FKBP5 intron 7, but in the opposite direction; Holocaust survivors had 10% higher methylation than control parents, whereas Holocaust offspring had 7.7% lower methylation than control offspring.

the difference in the parents, compared to the control group was represented by ?three individuals and in the offspring by, what? one individual?

IMO, it suggests an interesting area for a much larger study, or more looking along similar lines, but is certainly not anything to draw a firm conclusion from.

 

[joeylittle]

IMO, it suggests an interesting area for a much larger study, or more looking along similar lines, but is certainly not anything to draw a firm conclusion from.

I don't disagree; just wanted to add that the article is pretty clear on that point. All the researchers said was that it appeared to be enough to warrant future study - and that there were a number of factors that were not being examined within this very small cross-section.

It's interesting, the difference between leading headlines in mainstream 'popular' media, and how the reporting works on the standard, (boring), science pages. I'm starting to notice I have to shift my own skepticism meter depending on exactly what I'm looking at.

They also hinted towards in-utero research being important, in mentioning that these very preliminary observations indicated that it could become relevant to ask not only about life trauma, but pre-natal trauma, when gathering history. Do you have any breadcrumbs one could follow to the Dutch Hunger Winter info, @Anarchy?

 

[Anarchy]

Only mentions in a bunch of vids of Robert Sapolsky's lectures.

Apparently there's a lot higher incidence of things like schizophrenia amongst those who were in the last trimester in utero during the hunger winter compared to those who were earlier in gestation and those who were outside the womb.

There are also the epigenetic effects of fammine - those people's bodies are a lot quicker to put fats into storage, so they suffer far more heart attacks, diabetes etc

and their offspring in turn have a lot poorer nutrition in utero, and so the turning on and off of genes that occurs to prepare and optimise us all for the world were are to be born into, ends up passing the same problems on to them.