New research on mice finds that trauma conditions at a young age produce PTSD-like symptoms, and the symptoms cause genetic changes that are passed down to offspring.
Read Genetic scars of the Holocaust: Children suffer too on Time.com.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
Ox Drover
This goes along with what Liane and others have said about how environment changes (turns on or off) various genes in our DNA. Interesting study for sure.
In fact, I guess that anything that happens to us positive or negative has an impact on what we are.
I also remember reading a study done with rats that seems to have been born out by studying populations of people who have been in famine.
If a mother rat is starved while she is preg. The babies are born mentally “retarded” compared to normal rats, even if after birth they are given a perfect diet.
Interestingly enough, the males if mated to normal rats have normal babies, but the females if mated to normal males still have retarded offspring for 3 generations.
Since stress of various kinds makes a difference in the chemical make up of our bodies and brains even if those babies are given “great” environments after birth, if they were born to a mother who was stressed or had chemical changes after stress, I can see how they would be effected.
Not like the old idea (cant remember the name of the kind of idea) but where they thought “learning” could be passed on to the next generation of offspring in the womb.
teacher123
All well and good, but these people experimented and tortured millions of real people. This is mankinds darkest hour. I can see how it could affect generations after. I get chills from it oceans away from it. I have no desire to visit Germany ever- if only to see it through the eyes of liberation. But how about instead of a Holocaust remembrance day they call it the forget the Nazis day? The one day that is really misnamed is the day of Jesus’ crucifixion- people call that one good Friday.
one/joy_step_at_a_time
given what my mother lived through in her life, i wouldn’t be surprised if it effected my makeup. in these last few months i see ticks and habits of hers in me…i know how stressed I am, and it makes me question how stressed she was.
Deb
This is interesting to me because at a very early age in life I experienced a series of traumatic things starting from the age of 3 watching my mother fall down a flight of steps and being taken away to a hospital where she died 5 years later, paralyzed from the neck down with a brain tumor and living in an orphanage and then a very abuse foster home before ending up in a “normal” foster home and then on my own by age 17. I have always felt that my ability to separate one person from another and give trust without being affected by other people who I could not trust was both a curse and a blessing. I see this in my children too but when it is a curse my children seem vulnerable because of their ability to trust others – probably those that should not be trusted, just as I am aware that I have done for a lifetime. My trauma caused me to be “overly fair” in assessing even a bad situation and I think I passed that trait on.
Ox Drover
Dear Deb,
Welcome to Love Fraud. Glad you are here.
Clarify for me what you mean by “overly fair” if you would.
Again, Welcome.
jofary
I’ve always wondered if my oldest son was born with cerebral palsy (brain damage) – despite a picture perfect pregnancy and delivery – because of the extreme stress I was under being married to the first spath.
That man made me so sick physically. The sadism, mind-games, crazy-making, perpetual lying, etc. was more than I could handle. Perfectly healthy before I met him, I became allergic to practically everything under the sun, developed endometriosis, and was about twenty pounds underweight. It all vanished the day I left him, though, and I haven’t been sick a day since!
Ox Drover
Dear Jofray,
How bad is the CP with your son? How is your son doing? What age is he now? Was the P his father?
verity
This might explain why my daughter, who has been brought up in conditions exactly opposite to my own, shows similiarities to me that she really could do without, like hypervigilance. I didn’t know whether it was because maybe I had over-protected her, because of my own complex ptsd, or whether the behaviours were ‘hers’ from birth (it seemed to be so as she would startle so easily, for example). I suppose at least if there’s the possibility that she’s inherited it she can learn the coping strategies I’m learning now for the first time.
Redwald
Lamarckism, Oxy? A belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics. What’s reported here is a bit different, because the changes affecting the second generation aren’t necessarily adaptive, but the basic premise is similar.
Ox Drover
Redwald, Something along that Line, but not sure if that is the word, but your definition is correct about the meaning of what I was trying to say. Gosh I wish I had a memory like I use’ta’do! CRS
While THAT concept was dis-proven, because if you taught a rat to run a maze correctly, its offspring would NOT have INHERITED that knowledge.
What the current study seems to show is that the anxiety, PTSD etc of the parent(s) has some effect on the off spring, possibly by turning on or off expression of certain genes. Which I think is possible.
Well, need to get up and get cracking have an appointment in town! See you guys later.