4 ms·

I didn't read this study, but I can't help but comment that past studies on this topic are of dubious quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_tr

I didn't read this study, but I can't help but comment that past studies on this topic are of dubious quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma#Criticism_of_inherited_trauma_via_epigenetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma#Criti... so very likely this is nonsense too. I think the main problem is that something like "science proves generational trauma is real" is a nice headline, so people p-hack it into existence. "Science proves that generational trauma is not real" is just a null hypothesis being confirmed - not a publishable result and nobody cares, so you'll never hear about it. So be very skeptical of nice headlines, especially in university press releases!

ch4s3 2y ago
I read this study earlier in the week. It doesn’t have a larger sample size, but the way they identified the genes could present problems. They did a whole genome search and found 21 genes with the associated change, across 131 participants. It’s hard to know if f they’ve correctly isolated that the cause is the conflict exposure. There could be a lot of other things going on here. The first group where the grandmothers were exposed all moved to Jordan in 1980, and the other group on 2011. There could be something about moving to and living in Jordan that caused the methylation. Here’s the link to the study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z