Transgenerational Transmission of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Please note that these are my personal notes from my readings.

From How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (2010) by Annie Murphy Paul, pages 44 – 47:

Rachel Yehuda, a psychiatrist who is the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the VA and a professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, is a leading expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that forces survivors of a traumatic event into a state of hypervigilance, assailing them with nightmares and panic attacks.

In the course of her career as a PTSD researcher, she has worked mostly with Holocaust victims and Vietnam War veterans — people whose trauma happened far away and many years, even many decades, ago.  As Yehuda watched 9/11 in real time, she was already thinking about how to investigate its impact.

In years since 9/11, Yehuda has coauthored more than a dozen articles about its effects on survivors, including several deeply intriguing studies of women who were exposed during pregnancy.  She has a special interest in the transgenerational transmission of PTSD risk, or the handing down of a susceptibility to PTSD from parent to child.

Yehuda encountered a vivid example of this phenomenon in 1993, when she opened the first clinic in the world devoted to the psychological treatment of Holocaust victims.  She expected a flood of inquiries from people who had experienced Nazi persecution firsthand.  Instead, for each call her clinic received from a Holocaust survivor, it was getting five calls from their grown children.  “Many of these members of the second generation had symptoms of PTSD.” They reported the same nightmares, the same panics, the same hair trigger vigilance that their parents had.  Yehuda’s research confirmed that the offspring of parents with PTSD were more likely to develop PTSD themselves, even though they were no more likely to encounter traumatic events than other people.

…  In a study of Holocaust survivors and their grown children, Yehuda found that the offspring were more likely to develop PTSD if their mothers, but not their fathers, had PTSD — suggesting “that classic genetic mechanisms are not the sole model of transmission.”  In tracing the roots of PTSD, Yehuda says that “we need to be looking where we hadn’t even considered looking before” — in the womb.