Stress can cause a wide variety of health problems. It can make your current health issues become worse. You probably are aware that when parents are stressed out it has an effect on their children. A study finds that parents who are stressed out actually leave an imprint on their kid’s DNA.
A study done by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of British Columbia finds that parents who are stressed out during their children’s early years actually affect their child’s DNA. The imprinting has been shown to last until the child reaches adolescence. More studies will need to be done to see if the affect lasts longer than that. It could also affect how those imprinted genes are expressed later in life.
There is a long running study called the Wisconsin Study of Families and Work. It takes a look at the health and development of kids from around 500 families that live in the Madison and Milwaukee area. For the current study, researchers measured the methylation patterns found in the cheek-cell DNA that was collected from over 100 adolescents. All of the adolescents were age fifteen when the DNA sample was collected.
Next, the researchers compared the information learned from the DNA to data that was gathered in 1991. At that time, the children in the study were infants and toddlers. Their parents were given a survey asking them to report about their stress levels. Specifically, they were asked about depression, parenting stress, financial stress, and “family-expressed anger”.
They found that children of mothers who reported experiencing high levels of stress when their child was an infant had methylation levels on 139 DNA sites when those babies became teenagers. A total of 31 of those sites correlated with fathers that reported high stress levels when their children were preschoolers.
The study shows that young children are very much affected by the day to day stress levels of parents. It influences changes in the child’s DNA that can still be observed when the child becomes a teenager, over ten years later.
Did your ancestors live through some very stressful times? Were they young children during The Great Depression, or when a war was taking place? If their parents were stressed out, then it seems likely that their parent’s stress affected the children’s DNA. People pass a certain amount of their genetics on to their children. Does this mean that stress actually alters the DNA of future generations? I’m not sure, but it is interesting to consider.
Image by bottled_void on Flickr