A life-altering experience “doesn’t just die with you,” one expert says. “It has a life of its own afterwards.”
Scientists are gathering evidence that suggests emotional trauma can transcend generations by altering how genes in the offspring are switched on and offEmerging science suggests that the effects of trauma—from war and genocide to abuse and environmental factors—could be genetically passed down from one generation to another.
“If you feel you have been affected by a very traumatic, difficult, life-altering experience that your mother or father has had, there’s something to that,” says Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience of trauma at Mount Sinai in New York.points to a small epigenetic “signal” that a life-altering experience “doesn’t just die with you,” she says. “It has a life of its own afterwards in some form.
In a subsequent study published in 2020, Yehuda examined a larger cohort of subjects, looking at variables such as the sex and age of the parent during the Holocaust. She examined DNA methylation, one of the methods the epigenome uses to activate or quiet genes. DNA methylation generally adds a chemical mark to DNA; demethylation removes it.in the FKBP5 gene in children whose mothers survived the Holocaust than in Jewish control subjects whose parents didn’t experience the Holocaust.
One early study in 2005 investigated whether exposure to the agricultural fungicide vinclozolin could affect the sex of offspring in pregnant rats. It didn’t.
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