Mental illness may be transferred from one generation to another, says a new study. According to a study of adults whose parents evacuated Finland as children during World War II, it was found that daughters of female evacuees had the same high risk for mental health disorders as their mothers, even though they did not experience the same adversity. The study by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and Helsinki University in Finland could not determine why the higher risk for mental illness persisted across generations.
Possible explanations include changes in the evacuees' parenting behaviour stemming from their childhood experience or epigenetic changes - chemical alterations in gene expression, without any changes to underlying DNA. "Many studies have shown that traumatic exposures during pregnancy can have negative effects on offspring," said scientist from Eunice Kennedy…
