Anxiety

A new multigenerational study appears to indicate that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression all have genetic links.

The study involved 200 survivors (from 12 multigenerational families) of the 1988 Armenian earthquake. The earthquake killed 17,000 people and ruined almost half the city of Gumri.

All of the survivors in the study witnessed destroyed buildings throughout the city of Gumri, 92% of the participants saw severely injured people, and 90% of them witnessed dead bodies, which were left lying in the streets after the earthquake.

The participants in this study suffered from varying degrees of anxiety, PTSD, and depression, say the UCLA researchers who conducted the current study. Armen Goenjian, who is a research psychiatrist at UCLA and lead author of the current study and his colleagues, discovered that all three conditions had genetic components.

More specifically, the researchers discovered that 41% of the variation of PTSD symptoms was accounted for by genes. Additionally, 61% of the variation in depression symptoms, and 66% of the variation in anxiety symptoms are accounted for by genetics.

The researchers also discovered that genes were responsible for co-occurring conditions. They used statistical analyses to determine these findings. In one technique, they would determine the genetic component of a condition, then compare phenotypes to determine if any of the conditions shared genes.

They discovered that PTSD and depression, depression and anxiety, and PTSD and anxiety all shared a significant number of genes.

These UCLA researchers were able to determine that PTSD, depression, and anxiety all have genetic components and that some of these conditions share common genes as well. Perhaps future research can pinpoint which genes are responsible for each condition as well as which genes are shared amongst depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

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Source:

Psych Central: Family Connection for Depression, Anxiety, PTSD