“Psychiatric risk that reached into the next generation” is what researchers from Uppsala University and Helsinki University found when they conducted a study of adults whose mothers had been evacuated as children from Finland during World War II.
Between 1941 and 1945, nearly 50,000 Finnish children were evacuated from their homes and placed with Swedish foster families. However, at the same time, many Finnish families kept their children at home. All the children experienced the stresses of war but the evacuees also had to learn a new language, adapt to new family situations, and then re-adapt when they went back to Finland. The researchers linked records from more than 46,000 siblings born between 1933 and 1944 with those of their offspring, more than 93,000 individuals born after 1950. Of those, nearly 3,000 were offspring of parents who had been evacuated to Sweden as children and more than 90,000 were offspring of parents who remained in Finland during the war.
Former-evacuee women and their daughters had the highest risk of being hospitalized for mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorders. In fact, evacuees’ daughters had more than 4 times the risk of hospitalization for a mood disorder compared with that of the daughters of mothers who had stayed at home regardless of whether their mothers were hospitalized for a mood disorder.
The researchers did not find any increase in psychiatric hospitalizations for the sons or daughters of men who had been evacuated as children. They could not determine why the daughters of female evacuees had a higher risk of mental illness. Possible explanations include changes in the evacuees’ parenting behavior stemming from their childhood experiences or chemical changes in gene expression, the researchers say. They cite earlier research that showed Holocaust survivors have passed on to their children higher levels of methyl groups bound to the gene FKBP5, which may alter the production of cortisol.