Intergenerational transmission of paternal trauma among US Civil War ex-POWs

Abstract

SignificanceUnderstanding whether paternal trauma is transmitted to children to affect their longevity, the mechanisms behind any transmission, and the reversibility of paternal trauma can inform health interventions and increase our understanding of the persistence of health within families. We show that severe paternal hardship as a prisoner of war (POW) led to high mortality among sons, but not daughters, born after the war who survived to the age of 45 but that adequate maternal nutrition countered the effect of paternal POW trauma in a manner most consistent with epigenetic explanations. We are not aware of any large sample studies in human populations that examine the reversibility of paternal trauma nor the long-term impact of paternal ex-POW status on children.

Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation

“…Intuitively, our empirical strategy exploits a discontinuity around the threshold of 280 days after conception and assigns a child to intrauterine stress exposure if the relative's death occurred before this date. 24 In model 5, y iymp is an outcome of individual i , conceived in year and month (y, m) , with a mother residing in municipality p in the year before conception. ψ y and ϕ m are year and month of conception fixed effects, respectively, and ρ p are pre-conception municipality fixed effects.…”

“…25 In parts of our analysis, we also analyze pregnancy trimester-and month-specific impacts, replacing 1 [c ≤ RelativeDeath < e b ] iymp with indicator variables capturing whether the death occurred in the expected first, second, or third trimester or the expected first through ninth months of pregnancy, respectively. 24 We also can estimate models where we use 1 [c ≤ RelativeDeath < e b ] iymp to instrument for exposure to death before the child's actual date of birth. As the instrument (relative death before expected birth date) is different from the actual exposure variable (relative death before actual birth date) for only about 1 percent of the individuals in our data, the first stage is very strong with a coefficient of around 0.97.…”

Intergenerational Effects of Alcohol: A Review of Paternal Preconception Ethanol Exposure Studies and Epigenetic Mechanisms in the Male Germline

“…() found that offspring of women that survived the Holocaust prior to conception were at increased risk for the development of PTSD, depression, and anxiety disorders. Furthermore, a new study found that male descendants of civil war prisoners of war exhibited increased mortality (Costa et al., ). Finally, a family history of alcoholism is associated with altered inheritance of a unique epigenetic signature at 2 putative oncogenes (Hill et al., ).…”

Wartime health shocks and the postwar socioeconomic status and mortality of union army veterans and their children

“…There is evidence from intergenerational and multigenerational data consistent with epigenetic transmission of health in cases of extreme maternal, paternal, and grandparental over-and under-feeding (e.g. Kaati et al 2007;Heijmans et al 2008;Vågerö et al 2018;Costa et al 2018). Economic theory points to a role for the transmission of parental health through socioeconomic channels.…”