Research Team Genetic Changes due to War Trauma, Genetic Changes to Grandchildren and Grandsons
Feb 28, 2025
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According to a study by Professor Connie Mulligan of the University of Florida in the United States published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports on the 28th, research on people and their descendants who have experienced sectarian slaughter and civil war in Syria has confirmed this.
The research team investigated whether trauma-induced epigenetic changes remained in the genes of Syrian families who experienced sectarian slaughter in the 1980s and civil war in the 2010s.
The gene that has changed due to environmental factors is inherited.
Some of the Syrian families involved in the study suffered a sectarian massacre in 1982 when the Syrian Assad regime surrounded Hamash and killed tens of thousands of people before moving to Jordan, and some avoided the Hamash massacre but later suffered a civil war against the Assad regime. Control families moved to Jordan before 1980, before the violence.
The research team collected genetic analysis samples from 138 people, including grandmothers, mothers, and their children, who were pregnant at the time of the two incidents within 48 families, identified epigenetic transformation and investigated their association with the experience of violence.
As a result, 14 genomic transformation areas caused by the violent trauma experienced by grandmothers were found in the grandchildren and grandchildren of survivors of the Hamash massacre. This modification is interpreted as showing that stress-induced epigenetic changes can also occur in future generations. In addition, 21 sites of epigenetic change were found in the genomes of people who experienced violence directly in Syria, and those exposed to violence when in their mother's womb showed epigenetic acceleration associated with aging diseases.
The research team explained that most of these epigenetic changes showed the same pattern after exposure to violence, suggesting that a common epigenetic response to stress can affect future generations as well as those directly exposed to stress.
Previously, the trauma suffered by survivors of the Holocaust during World War II is inherited to their childrenThe results of research on ' have also been published.
Reporter Kim So-hyung compact@sportschosun.com
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
