5 ms·

Daughters of WWII refugees are more likely to have mental illness: study

64 points by pshaw 9y ago

reasonattlm 9y ago
Links between early life adversity and later pace of aging and risk of age-related disease may be mediated by cytomegalovirus exposure. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01263 https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01263 "The paper here finds that persistent cytomegalovirus infection is likely the mediating mechanism linking early life stress and later increased risk of age-related disease, acting through accelerated immune system dysfunction. This implies that the early stress may or may not be all that important, as - for whatever reason - the groups selected as examples of stress in early life are also more likely to be infected. That might be the short-term detrimental effects of stress on immune function, or it could be a matter of being in close contact with more distinct groups of people during childhood, as is the case for the adopted individuals in the study here. Cytomegalovirus is a persistent herpesvirus that the immune system cannot effectively clear from the body. Near everyone becomes infected at some point in life, and extensive evidence links this infection with immune system dysfunction. Increasing numbers of immune cells become dedicated to uselessly fighting cytomegalovirus, and ever fewer are left for everything else the immune system must accomplish. Other than this long-term corrosion, cytomegalovirus doesn't cause obvious symptoms in the vast majority of people - few notice the initial infection." This is also compatible as a mechanism to explain greater disease risk in descendants, since growing up in an infected household presumably raises the risk of early infection with cytomegalovirus.
- goialoq 9y ago
  How does this relate to OP, which found a difference between genders living in the same places, and which is about mental illness, not age-related illness? Edit: Oh, you work at an age-related disease website, so you comment exclusively through that lens.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
Women tend to also have a lot more social baggage hung on them. It makes me wonder if the evacuation and trauma made it particularly difficult to figure out how to fit in socially in a new place. (I mean as just one element that may have contributed.)
- emsy 9y ago
  >Women tend to have a lot more social baggage There are studies that show that women internalise emotional traumata much deeper than men, thus have a higher risk of PTSD (Can't remember if this is linked to the on-average better memory of women). As far as I know this is unrelated to the fact that women are more likely to seek help for mental issues (which would naturally skew the numbers towards women).
  - owebmaster 9y ago
    > As far as I know this is unrelated to the fact that women are more likely to seek help for mental issues How do you "AFAIK" it? Do you have some statistics showing women have more PTSD than men after traumatic situations? Another comment got a lot of downvotes saying basically the same thing.
    - emsy 9y ago
      I don't understand why you're down voted for this, it's a valid question. I afaiked it, because I read about it in one or two papers, but I honestly didn't bother to source check for an offhand comment on HN.
  - belorn 9y ago
    "Doctors are more likely to diagnose depression in women compared with men, even when they have similar scores on standardized measures of depression or present with identical symptoms." -WHO This would also skew the numbers towards women. Seeking help and not getting it because of gender bias can have a very strong negative effect. We keep hearing here on HN how not being taken serious by the police will make victims stop reporting crime. There is no reason why the same effect should not apply here. To cite an other researcher and problem: "Johnson also cites depression as a key example of gender bias in the diagnosis of psychological disorders. She explains that the current profile for depression is based on a female model." It is rather well established that a lot of historical research only looked at either men or women when establishing models we use today to diagnose problems. ADHD comes in mind where a lot of identifiers are based on a male model, causing a lot of women to be miss diagnosed. Depression apparently has the opposite gender bias.
jcobber 9y ago
As a person with MDD, I'm glad studies like these are coming out. This is the best resource material I've seen about MDD and it's helped me a lot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'll second this video recommendation. Robert Sapolsky is an incredible researcher and lecturer.
chrismcb 9y ago
Interesting. But the study only looks at hospitalization. Is it possible that women are more likely to go to the hospital than men?
- megaman22 9y ago
  Hospital? I'm not sure... But women are much more likely to see a doctor regularly than men are.
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  Men kill themselves.
- wvh 9y ago
  I reckon men with mental issues tend to end up in jail in many cases.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Drugs too, homeless as well.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Yes, but doesn't the genetic control here also control for that? They compared first children of refugees to their first-cousins born to non-refugees, and found a difference in frequency. So presumably a change would still be detected if sons of refugees were less likely than daughters to be hospitalized. (I can think of some other ways gender could mess this up, I guess. For instance: schizophrenia is more common in men, heavily genetic, and probably not affected by refugee status - which could create a "base load" of male hospitalizations that pushes any change among men below significance.) Also striking, though: "was not true for male offspring or the descendents of men." The headline misses it, but this result was only for daughters of mothers; even daughters of fathers (i.e. people with female hospitalization rates) weren't affected. That's the part that screams 'epigenetics' to me.
megaman22 9y ago
Read The Last 100 Days or listen to Dan Carlin's Ghosts of the Ostfront podcasts to get a sense of how apocalyptic that conflict was. No wonder the psychic scars persist for generations.
cisanti 9y ago
Lol men died at war and you talk about baggage, do fuck yourself Cia shill.
vectorEQ 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics if you know that this is heavily triggered by emotional / feels, then you can see why women might be more suceptible to these things. (as they are generally raised in a way to be more on the feels side of things, there is actually no natural difference, only imprinted later in life.)
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  Certainly there was a difference back then in how male and female children were allowed to deal with emotion. I was viciously beaten as a child in the early sixties for crying - as were my brothers - to teach me not to. My sister wasn't until older, if at all. These beatings could go on for very long periods of time, until breathing became convulsive, and continued after that point, too. When my younger brother died in his teens, my "training" held and I wasn't able to cry (but I've got that back in spades, since.) This was only somewhat extreme for the time. So back then, was there a "feels" (repression) difference for men and women? Oh, yeah, by no accident. However, I believe the evidence shows this actually leaves males more vulnerable to trauma and PTSD, not less. I don't have links for that, just memory of the science, but what you deal with during the day is perhaps less likely to keep you up at night.
jacquesm 9y ago
I closely knew a man who was a 'second generation World War II victim'. Outwardly a normal person but utterly unable to normally function in society. The government recognized his plight and put him on a lifelong pension which he used to try to do as much good as he could in the neighborhood where he lived (and where he was hugely popular).
dev360 9y ago
This is a crazy coincidence. Me and my sister are trying to get help for my mom right now for the very same thing, and our grandma was a WWII refugee from Finland.
jcrei 9y ago
Can we use this knowledge to do something about the children and especially the daughters of the refugees coming out of Syria now?
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  Are there that many women and children coming out of Syria? It seems like most of the migrants into the E.U are working aged men.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Missing from the headline: this is only daughters of female refugees. Sons of refugees had unchanged mental illness rates, but so did daughters of male refugees. That's pretty surprising, and while it doesn't rule out a gender-roles explanation (maybe male refugees didn't describe their experiences as often?), it does gesture pointedly at epigenetic causes. Also notable: the study had a clever control (non-refugee first cousins of refugee children) which seems to account for both population genetics and gender distinctions in hospitalization.

64 points by pshaw 9y ago

Links between early life adversity and later pace of aging and risk of age-related disease may be mediated by cytomegalovirus exposure. https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01263 https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01263 "The paper here finds that persistent cytomegalovirus infection is likely the mediating mechanism linking early life stress and later increased risk of age-related disease, acting through accelerated immune system dysfunction. This implies that the early stress may or may not be all that important, as - for whatever reason - the groups selected as examples of stress in early life are also more likely to be infected. That might be the short-term detrimental effects of stress on immune function, or it could be a matter of being in close contact with more distinct groups of people during childhood, as is the case for the adopted individuals in the study here. Cytomegalovirus is a persistent herpesvirus that the immune system cannot effectively clear from the body. Near everyone becomes infected at some point in life, and extensive evidence links this infection with immune system dysfunction. Increasing numbers of immune cells become dedicated to uselessly fighting cytomegalovirus, and ever fewer are left for everything else the immune system must accomplish. Other than this long-term corrosion, cytomegalovirus doesn't cause obvious symptoms in the vast majority of people - few notice the initial infection." This is also compatible as a mechanism to explain greater disease risk in descendants, since growing up in an infected household presumably raises the risk of early infection with cytomegalovirus.

goialoq 9y ago
How does this relate to OP, which found a difference between genders living in the same places, and which is about mental illness, not age-related illness? Edit: Oh, you work at an age-related disease website, so you comment exclusively through that lens.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

Women tend to also have a lot more social baggage hung on them. It makes me wonder if the evacuation and trauma made it particularly difficult to figure out how to fit in socially in a new place. (I mean as just one element that may have contributed.)

emsy 9y ago
>Women tend to have a lot more social baggage There are studies that show that women internalise emotional traumata much deeper than men, thus have a higher risk of PTSD (Can't remember if this is linked to the on-average better memory of women). As far as I know this is unrelated to the fact that women are more likely to seek help for mental issues (which would naturally skew the numbers towards women).
- owebmaster 9y ago
  > As far as I know this is unrelated to the fact that women are more likely to seek help for mental issues How do you "AFAIK" it? Do you have some statistics showing women have more PTSD than men after traumatic situations? Another comment got a lot of downvotes saying basically the same thing.
  - emsy 9y ago
    I don't understand why you're down voted for this, it's a valid question. I afaiked it, because I read about it in one or two papers, but I honestly didn't bother to source check for an offhand comment on HN.
- belorn 9y ago
  "Doctors are more likely to diagnose depression in women compared with men, even when they have similar scores on standardized measures of depression or present with identical symptoms." -WHO This would also skew the numbers towards women. Seeking help and not getting it because of gender bias can have a very strong negative effect. We keep hearing here on HN how not being taken serious by the police will make victims stop reporting crime. There is no reason why the same effect should not apply here. To cite an other researcher and problem: "Johnson also cites depression as a key example of gender bias in the diagnosis of psychological disorders. She explains that the current profile for depression is based on a female model." It is rather well established that a lot of historical research only looked at either men or women when establishing models we use today to diagnose problems. ADHD comes in mind where a lot of identifiers are based on a male model, causing a lot of women to be miss diagnosed. Depression apparently has the opposite gender bias.

jcobber 9y ago

As a person with MDD, I'm glad studies like these are coming out. This is the best resource material I've seen about MDD and it's helped me a lot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

dredmorbius 9y ago
I'll second this video recommendation. Robert Sapolsky is an incredible researcher and lecturer.

chrismcb 9y ago

Interesting. But the study only looks at hospitalization. Is it possible that women are more likely to go to the hospital than men?

megaman22 9y ago
Hospital? I'm not sure... But women are much more likely to see a doctor regularly than men are.
PeachPlum 9y ago
Men kill themselves.
wvh 9y ago
I reckon men with mental issues tend to end up in jail in many cases.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Drugs too, homeless as well.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Yes, but doesn't the genetic control here also control for that? They compared first children of refugees to their first-cousins born to non-refugees, and found a difference in frequency. So presumably a change would still be detected if sons of refugees were less likely than daughters to be hospitalized. (I can think of some other ways gender could mess this up, I guess. For instance: schizophrenia is more common in men, heavily genetic, and probably not affected by refugee status - which could create a "base load" of male hospitalizations that pushes any change among men below significance.) Also striking, though: "was not true for male offspring or the descendents of men." The headline misses it, but this result was only for daughters of mothers; even daughters of fathers (i.e. people with female hospitalization rates) weren't affected. That's the part that screams 'epigenetics' to me.

megaman22 9y ago

Read The Last 100 Days or listen to Dan Carlin's Ghosts of the Ostfront podcasts to get a sense of how apocalyptic that conflict was. No wonder the psychic scars persist for generations.

cisanti 9y ago

Lol men died at war and you talk about baggage, do fuck yourself Cia shill.

vectorEQ 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics if you know that this is heavily triggered by emotional / feels, then you can see why women might be more suceptible to these things. (as they are generally raised in a way to be more on the feels side of things, there is actually no natural difference, only imprinted later in life.)

Nomentatus 9y ago
Certainly there was a difference back then in how male and female children were allowed to deal with emotion. I was viciously beaten as a child in the early sixties for crying - as were my brothers - to teach me not to. My sister wasn't until older, if at all. These beatings could go on for very long periods of time, until breathing became convulsive, and continued after that point, too. When my younger brother died in his teens, my "training" held and I wasn't able to cry (but I've got that back in spades, since.) This was only somewhat extreme for the time. So back then, was there a "feels" (repression) difference for men and women? Oh, yeah, by no accident. However, I believe the evidence shows this actually leaves males more vulnerable to trauma and PTSD, not less. I don't have links for that, just memory of the science, but what you deal with during the day is perhaps less likely to keep you up at night.

jacquesm 9y ago

I closely knew a man who was a 'second generation World War II victim'. Outwardly a normal person but utterly unable to normally function in society. The government recognized his plight and put him on a lifelong pension which he used to try to do as much good as he could in the neighborhood where he lived (and where he was hugely popular).

dev360 9y ago

This is a crazy coincidence. Me and my sister are trying to get help for my mom right now for the very same thing, and our grandma was a WWII refugee from Finland.

jcrei 9y ago

Can we use this knowledge to do something about the children and especially the daughters of the refugees coming out of Syria now?

alexanderstears 9y ago
Are there that many women and children coming out of Syria? It seems like most of the migrants into the E.U are working aged men.

Bartweiss 9y ago

Missing from the headline: this is only daughters of female refugees. Sons of refugees had unchanged mental illness rates, but so did daughters of male refugees. That's pretty surprising, and while it doesn't rule out a gender-roles explanation (maybe male refugees didn't describe their experiences as often?), it does gesture pointedly at epigenetic causes. Also notable: the study had a clever control (non-refugee first cousins of refugee children) which seems to account for both population genetics and gender distinctions in hospitalization.