One more recent article on the same subject.......
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190326-what-is-epigenetics*************
For those who survived, the harrowing experiences marked many of them for life. They returned to society with impaired health, worse job prospects and shorter life expectancy. But the impact of these hardships did not stop with those who experienced it. It also had an effect on the prisoners’ children and grandchildren, which appeared to be passed down the male line of families.
While their sons and grandsons had not suffered the hardships of the PoW camps – and if anything were well provided for through their childhoods – they suffered higher rates of mortality than the wider population. It appeared the PoWs had passed on some element of their trauma to their offspring.
But unlike most inherited conditions, this was not caused by mutations to the genetic code itself. Instead, the researchers were investigating a much more obscure type of inheritance: how events in someone’s lifetime can change the way their DNA is expressed, and how that change can be passed on to the next generation.
This is the process of epigenetics, where the readability, or expression, of genes is modified without changing the DNA code itself.
Your experiences during your lifetime – particularly traumatic ones – would have a very real impact on your family for generations to come. There are a growing number of studies that support the idea that the effects of trauma can reverberate down the generations through epigenetics.
The sons of PoW veterans were also slightly more likely to die from cancer. But the daughters of former PoWs appeared to be immune to these effects.
This unusual sex-linked pattern was one of the reasons that made Costa suspect that these health differences were caused by epigenetic changes.
“The hypothesis is that there’s an epigenetic effect on the Y chromosome,” says Costa. This effect is consistent with studies in remote Swedish villages, where shortages in food supply had a generational effect down the male line, but not the female line.
And knowing that the consequences of our own actions and experiences now could affect the lives of our children – even long before they might be conceived – could put a very different spin on how we choose to live.
“There’s a malleability to the system,” says Dias. “The die is not cast. For the most part, we are not messed up as a human race, even though trauma abounds in our environment.”
At least in some cases, Dias says, healing the effects of trauma in our lifetimes can put a stop to it echoing further down the generations.
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