A team of researchers from the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (USA) has made a comparison of the DNA of a group of 32 Jewish men and women , with that of their children, all of them from families surviving the Holocaust. lived or not in a concentration camp. Their findings reveal that the genetic changes associated with these traumatic experiences can be passed down from generation to generation.
The scientists contrasted the genetic data of the group of Holocaust survivors with that of other Jewish families who had not lived in Europe during the Nazi regime in World War II. The results revealed that a gene associated with the regulation of the stress hormone, cortisol, suffered some alteration in all family members related to the Holocaust.
This modification occurred both in the survivors themselves and in their children; that is, it was confirmed that the traumatic experiences were inherited by the descendants. The researchers also carried out a series of clinical analyzes to rule out that the origin of this alteration was caused by the dramatic experiences of the descendants .
For this reason, “children of parents with post-traumatic stress disorder are probably more prone to depression since the genetic changes in these children can only be attributed to the fact that their parents were exposed to the Holocaust,” explains Rachel Yehuda, leader. from work.
It is undoubtedly ” the first evidence in humans – of which we have knowledge – of an epigenetic mark in the offspring based on the exposure of the parents , before conception”, clarifies Yehuda.
The study has been published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
