Epigenetics: Can Tragedies Be Inherited?
It is rare to find a generation that has not gone through some tragedy. When it wasn’t wars, they faced famine, genocide or brutal economic crises. We know the physical and psychological consequences, often devastating, that people can develop after such an experience, but can the tragedies can be inherited?
What had not been contemplated until a few years ago is that this type of experience seems to leave a genetic residue in those who suffer it, which can be passed on to subsequent generations. Animal studies demonstrate this.
Nevertheless, the research in humans have a clear ethical problem, which makes it extremely difficult to determine to what extent and how humans genetically inherit the tragedies and sufferings of their parents and grandparents.
Social psychology, first access route
It was possible to carry out some experiments in the field of social psychology, and the results could not be more revealing. These studies, conducted over generations, show that we can inherit tragedies, just as we do with animals.
Social psychology cannot determine which genetic mechanism, which type of mutation or gene is altered, but it has found that there are gender-differentiated patterns of inheritance. Something that is revolutionizing the world of psychology, sociology and genetic research.
Finland and World War II
A study by the team of Dr. Torsten Santavirta of the University of Uppsala found that the daughters of children who were evacuated from Finland in World War II had far more problems with hospitalization for psychological disorders than other people whose parents were not evacuated.
The research, furthermore, showed that this fact did not appear to have affected the male offspring of the evacuated children. There has been an attempt to explain this fascinating fact by the idea that mental illnesses, in general, are less common in men. Still, the coincidence is amazing.
Confederate soldiers
Another study carried out on the descendants of Confederate soldiers who passed through the Andersonville, Georgia prison camp, during the US War of Succession produced data very similar to that of Finland.
The children of prison camp survivors lived much less than the children of other war veterans who had not been taken prisoner. It was discovered that many of them had died much younger than their older brothers who had been born before the war. That is, before your parents went through the trauma and could pass it on.
The grandchildren of the Holocaust could inherit the tragedy
One of the first published studies on this topic was carried out with survivors of concentration camps under the Nazi regime. The research team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York studied the genetic makeup of a group of Jews who had been in concentration camps and compared it with that of their children.
The study focused on a specific region of a gene associated with the regulation of stress hormones and found that both the survivors and their children had this gene affected due to hereditary trauma. To guarantee the results, parallel genetic analyzes were carried out to rule out the possibility that the children, the second generation, could have modified the gene due to some traumatic experience of their own.
The inexplicable gender differentiation
Along with all of the above, there are other unexplained data so far. Just as the legacy of trauma in the case of children evacuated from Finland seems to have been transmitted only to daughters, in the case of prisoners of war the data is reversed. It seems that in this case the inheritance of trauma was received only by the children.
All these investigations are bringing to light knowledge that can be extremely important for the future of human mental and physical health. It appears that humans can inherit the tragedies that befell their ancestors, although at the moment studies are raising far more questions than answers.
