by Khushi Faldu
(Source from BBC News)
With the coronavirus infiltrating every part of people’s lives, many are living in constant conditions of stress. Either financially or emotionally, we are having to be constantly thinking about something of the future. Many of us are apprehensive about the future, potentially resulting in trauma.
Trauma of all sorts can be passed down from generation to generation. It leaves a chemical mark affecting epigenetics, instead of a genetic mutation [5]. Epigenetics is the study of how the environment and your behaviors affect the way your genes work (or are expressed). Essentially, they control how or why your genes are expressed [4].
Extreme situations affect future generations throughout history. The Dutch Hunger Winter, a harsh winter with bad crops, four years of brutal war with the Nazis imposing an embargo on food transport to the western Netherlands in September 1944. During this time, many pregnant women were impacted with this trauma, and it impacted their children [1]. They found that the children in the utero were a few pounds heavier than the average baby. When the children reached their half age, they had high cholesterol and triglyceride levels [1]. When scientists looked into the reasoning, they found that they had a chemical change on one of their genes [1].
Additionally, African Americans experienced slavery, segregation, and inequality for many years. Due to the physical and physiological trauma, they have been affected with post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Specifically, J. Marion Simms experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia (it was believed that they did not feel pain) [3]. Therefore, many African Americans have a distrust for the medical system as it is encoded in their DNA through epigenetics [3]. This causes them more likely to feel a foreshortened future, have outbursts of sleep, hypervigilance, and more. Luckily, there are different therapies to help solve this including cognitive behavioral therapy [3].
Could the current pandemic cause people to carry epigenetic changes that affect future generations? Is the extreme stress going to affect the future and so many lives?
Sources
Article by: Karina Margit Erdelyi. (2020, March 31). Can trauma be passed down from one generation to the next? Retrieved March 10, 2021, from https://www.psycom.net/epigenetics-trauma#:~:text=Here's%20how%3A%20Trauma%20can%20leave,is%20not%20genetic%2C%20but%20epigenetic.
Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations? (n.d.). Retrieved March 13, 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190326-what-is-epigenetics
Clemmons, J. (n.d.). Black Families Have Inherited Trauma, but We Can Change ThatJacquelyn Clemmons. Retrieved March 10, 2021, from https://www.healthline.com/health/parenting/epigenetics-and-the-black-experience#Our-ancestors-trauma-lives-on
Trauma. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/trauma-toolkit/trauma-concept
What is Epigenetics? (2020, August 03). Retrieved March 10, 2021, from https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm