Interesting Articles - Abuse, adoption and epigenetics

[Lilka]

Saw a good new article on AUK. Epigenetics is something I've being reading up on a bit in the last couple of years and it's very very interesting. It also sheds more light on this whole nature/nurture thing. If anything, all the knowledge we have now shows that it's not about nature vs nurture, but about the interaction of the two things which both play a clear part.

The new article on AUK is this It's good, explaining a bit about epigenetics and what that might mean for abused children

The basic idea is that an adverse environment and serious abuse can create genetic changes in a child. Experiements started in rats but basically all mammals studied have the same mechanisms. You can't change the DNA code itself, but the changes affect regulation and gene expression - what gets switched on and off.

So abuse can end up causing genetic changes which might change the persons response to stress, might affect empathy and other things.

In addition to this, we now know that resilience (ability to cope with things like abuse and ability to heal) is likely to be largely determined by genetics as well.

All this goes some way to explaining why in some cases children who are abused seem unable to heal however nurturing their adoptive/foster families are. For example how you can spend years trying to get yor children to respond to stressful situations in a different way but fail...well maybe they have changes on the genetic level which parenting and therapy won't be able to fix? We already know about abuse damaging brain development, but abuse seems to have a damaging effect on genetic processes as well.

More good stuff - this article talks about a study on suicide victims found genetic changes in stress response which seemed only to occur in people who had been abused, and expains some of the implications

This study done on people with PTSD, split people into those who had suffered abuse and those who had not and compared certain genetic things.

There are several proper scientific papers/studies freely available on the web as well. The in depth science about the genes and molecules gets too complicated for me to understand though!

Interesting post.
The age at which a child is abused/neglected is very important. A child learns to 'attach' in the first 18 months or so. If this vital milestone is misssed it cannot be recliamed.

As seen in the severely neglected Romianian ophans.

Thanks, Lilka - I'm looking forward to reading these.

So if early abuse can cause genetic changes, does that imply that our children may be burdened not only with an early adverse environment, possible abuse, possible impact of drugs and alcohol in utero and the psychological trauma of losing birth family, but also an inherited tendency to personality and other disorders due to the damaged dna of their birth parents (most of whom had pretty shitty early childhoods themselves)?

Is that one of the longest sentences ever written on MN?