Mums-to-be, you’d want to know this. Mental trauma during your childhood may impact your baby

Researchers found evidence that a mother’s childhood traumatic exposure - in this case separation from family members during war - may have long-lasting health consequences for her daughters.

Mental illness associated with early childhood adversity may be passed from one generation to another, according to a study of adults whose parents evacuated Finland as children during World War II. Researchers found that daughters of female evacuees had the same high risk for mental health disorders as their mothers, even though they did not experience the same adversity.

The study by researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and Helsinki University in Finland could not determine why the higher risk for mental illness persisted across generations. Possible explanations include changes in the evacuees’ parenting behaviour stemming from their childhood experience or epigenetic changes - chemical alterations in gene expression, without any changes to underlying DNA.

“Many studies have shown that traumatic exposures during pregnancy can have negative effects on offspring,” said Stephen Gilman, from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the US.

“Here, we found evidence that a mother’s childhood traumatic exposure - in this case separation from family members during war - may have long-lasting health consequences for her daughters,” said Gilman, author of the study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

The children, many of them only preschoolers, were placed with foster families in Sweden. In addition to separation from their families, the children faced the stresses of adapting to their foster families, and in many cases, learning a new language.

Upon their return, many children experienced the additional stress of readjusting to Finnish society. The researchers compared the risk of being hospitalised for a psychiatric (mental health) disorder among offspring of the evacuees to the risks of psychiatric hospitalisation among the offspring of the siblings who remained with their parents.

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