If you’ve ever experienced stress affecting how you feel physically, whether through feeling nervous and physically jittery, feeling anxious and physically tense, or feeling exhausted and foggy-minded, you may have wondered how all of that stress affects your health in the long-term.
Scientists have repeatedly found that stress affects our physical well-being. More recently, however, scientists have also found that stress and trauma can cause epigenetic changes, or switching on and off of genes that regulate body functions such as stress responses.
The impact of stress can be passed to future generations
Beyond even these alarming individual epigenetic changes, scientists have also begun to find that epigenetic changes due to stress and trauma can also be passed down to offspring. In a study of Holocaust survivors and their children, Rachel Yehuda and a team of researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York discovered just such a phenomenon.
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