Civil War data reveals that fathers ’ trauma can be passed on to sons

A UCLA study using Civil War-era data suggests that trauma suffered by a father can affect the lifespan of his child, but that the phenomenon can be neutralized before the child is even born — by the nutrients a mother takes in during pregnancy.Dora Costa, a UCLA professor of economics, analyzed records housed in the National Archives tracking the lifespans of sons of Union soldiers who were captured and held by the Confederacy as prisoners of war and who lived to be at least 45 years old.Although the data dated back to the mid-19th century, the findings could have important implications for human health today, Costa said. The notion that trauma passed through the father could be mitigated by the physical well-being of the mother could signal that there are ways to counter such trauma.  “There is an awful lot of research about what happens to the mother when a child is in utero, but there’s been very little looking at the father’s contribution,” Costa said. “One of the nice things about this paper is that it shows, yes, both the father and the mother do matter.”The study compared those children with children of Union soldiers who survived the war but were never POWs. Costa ’s work was published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Institutes of Health.The research even revealed that the effect on sons ’ health was more pronounced when fathers endured the direst POW privations than when their POW camp conditio...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news