It is rare to find a generation that has not experienced any tragedy, when it was not wars, they faced famines, genocides or brutal economic crises, we know the often devastating physical and psychological consequences that people can develop after such an experience.
What was not thought until a few years ago is that this type of experiment seems to leave a genetic residue in those who suffer from it, which can be transmitted to later generations, as evidenced by animal studies.
- Despite this.
- Human research poses a clear ethical problem.
- Making it extremely difficult to determine the extent to which and how humans genetically inherit the tragedies and sufferings of their parents and grandparents.
Experiments have been conducted in the field of social psychology, and the results could no longer be revealing. These studies, carried out over the generations, show that we can inherit tragedies, as with animals.
Social psychology cannot determine what genetic mechanism, type of mutation or gene is altered, but has discovered that there are gender-differentiated patterns of inheritance, something that revolutionizes the world of psychology, sociology and genetic research.
A study by Dr. Torsten Santavirta’s team at Uppsala University found that the daughters of children evacuated from Finland during World War II had many more problems hospitalizing for psychological disorders than others whose parents had not been evacuated.
Research also showed that this did not seem to have affected the males of evacuated children, an attempt has been made to explain this fascinating fact with the idea that mental illness, in general, is less common in men, but the coincidence is incredible.
“Our observation of long-term psychiatric risk passed on to the next generation is disturbing and highlights the need to weigh potential risks in the formulation of child protection policies. “Torsten Santavirta-
Another study of the descendants of Confederate soldiers who crossed the Andersonville, Georgia prison camp during the U. S. War of Succession produced data very similar to those in Finland.
The children of the survivors of the prison camps lived much less than the children of other veterans who had not been taken prisoner, it was discovered that many of them had died much younger than their older brothers born before the war. parents experience the trauma and transmit it.
“Certainly, there is a transfer of characteristics between generations in humans, something that can happen through well-known methods, such as genetic heritage or cultural heritage, such as learning. “Neil Youngson, professor at the University of New South Wales.
One of the first published studies on this subject was conducted among 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 to their children.
The study focused on a specific region of a gene associated with regulating stress hormones and found that survivors and their children had this affected gene as a result of hereditary trauma. To ensure the results, parallel genetic testing was carried out to rule out the possibility that children in the second generation may have modified the gene as a result of their own traumatic experience.
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 appears to have been passed on only to girls, in the case of prisoners of war, the data are reversed It seems that in this case, the legacy of the trauma was received only by the children.
All of these surveys highlight knowledge that can be extremely important to the future of human mental and physical health, it seems that humans can inherit the tragedies that happened to their ancestors, although at the moment studies raise many more questions than answers.