According to a study of 35 families conducted with magnetic resonance imaging and led by psychiatrist Fumiko Hoeft, from the University of California, San Francisco, characteristics of the brain circuit called the cortico-limbic system are more likely to pass from mother to daughter than from mother to daughter. those to their children, or from parents to their offspring of any gender.
The cortico-limbic system – which includes the amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex – regulates emotions and plays an important role in disorders such as depression.
Does this mean that depressive tendencies are passed genetically from mother to daughter? Not necessarily. As Hoeft explains on the website of his university, “many factors intervene in depression: genes that are not inherited from the mother, the social environment, life experiences … and that’s to name just three. The mother-daughter inheritance is just one more piece of that disease. “
According to previous studies, there is a strong hereditary mother-daughter link in the possibility of suffering from depression. Furthermore, animal work has indicated that female offspring are more likely to show changes in brain structures associated with emotions in response to maternal prenatal stress. What the Hoeft study has done is associate both lines of research.
The American psychiatrist affirms that her work is the first that “shows a possible matrilineal transmission of the human cortico-limbic system, implicated in depression. We are the first to use magnetic resonance imaging to study how patterns of brain structures are inherited from both parents. The results will allow us a better understanding of psychiatric disorders such as depression. And it must be taken into account that the inheritance of the parents also influences anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, dyslexia and other problems “.
Image: Corbis
