Anxious Men Father Anxious Daughters

According to a study of mice at Tufts University and published in Biological Psychiatry, women with anxiety may have their fathers to blame. When men are exposed to social instability as children, their sperm cells change and this gives rise to anxious and stressed behavior in their future daughters.

This phenomenon is called epigenetics or the science of changes in genes from one generation to the next.

“The long-term effects of stress can be pernicious. We first found that adolescent mice exposed to chronic social instability, where the cage composition of mice is constantly changing, exhibited anxious behavior and poor social interactions throughout adulthood. These changes were especially prominent in female mice,” said Lorena Saavedra-Rodriguez, Ph.D., from the Larry Feig laboratory at TUSM.

Although male mice were also affected, female mice were much more likely to display stressed, anxious and socially abnormal behavior. This effect can persist in women for generations.

Larry A Feig, Ph.D., lead author of the study said, “We are presently searching for biochemical changes in the sperm of stressed fathers that could account for this newly appreciated form of inheritance. Hopefully, this work will stimulate efforts to determine whether similar phenomena occur in humans.”

This study further establishes that anxiety is caused by a number of factors, including environmental, genetic and situational.

Although many of these factors are beyond our control, the good news is there are many forms of treatment available.

Chris Nicoletti is a writer for GoZen.com, a site dedicated to the relief of childhood anxiety.