Entertainment and Showbiz!, India
Dec 29 2008

Susceptibility to PTSD, depression and anxiety may be inherited

Posted by ranjankul in Other News

A study on the survivors of the massive 1988 earthquake that killed
17,000 people in Armenia, and destroyed nearly half the town of Gumri,
has revealed that vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder,
depression and anxiety may be inherited through genes.

Armen Goenjian, a research psychiatrist in the Department of
Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California,
Los Angeles, studied 200 participants from 12 multigenerational
families exposed to the earthquake.

The researcher revealed that the subjects suffered from varying
degrees of the disorders.

Reporting their findings in the journal Psychiatric Genetics, he and
his colleagues revealed that 41 percent of the variation of PTSD
symptoms was due to genetic factors.

They also said that 61 percent of the variation of depressive symptoms
and 66 percent of anxiety symptoms were attributable to genetics.

The team added that they found that a large proportion of the genetic
liabilities for the disorders were shared.

`This was a study of multigenerational family members – parents and
offspring, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings, and so on – and
we found that the genetic makeup of some of these individuals renders
them more vulnerable to develop PTSD, anxiety and depressive
symptoms,’ said Goenjian, a member of the UCLA-Duke University
National Center for Child Traumatic Stress and lead author of the
study.

According to him, the study suggests that a large percentage of genes
are shared between the disorders.

`That tracks with clinical experience. For example, in clinical
practice, the therapist will often discover that patients who come in
for treatment of depression have coexisting anxiety. Our findings show
that a substantial portion of the coexistence can be explained on the
basis of shared genes and not just environmental factors such as
upbringing,’ he said.

The study involving statistical methods to assess heritabilities
showed that that a significant amount of genes were shared between
PTSD and depression, PTSD and anxiety, and finally depression and
anxiety.

Goenjian claimed that this is the first time that a study suggesting
such a heritability of PTSD has been based on whole families, who were
exposed to a particular trauma like earthquake.

He said all previous studies showing such results had been twin
studies.

`It’s very hard to do family studies on PTSD because typically only
single individuals, not whole families, are exposed to a particular
trauma. In our study, we were able to avert this problem since all the
subjects were exposed to the same severe trauma at the same time,’ he
said.

Goenjian said that the findings were promising for the next step in
understanding the underlying biology of such disorders, that is,
locating the specific genes involved. (ANI)

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress