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offspring

the Twin Towers

post-traumatic stress disorder

cortisol

saliva

Holocaust

9/11

PTSD

genetics

symptoms

But could this effect be transmitted to their offspring?
They found nearly 200 women of whom a number had actually been in the Twin Towers. About half of them developed post-traumatic stress disorder. We then looked at those women and found they had abnormal cortisol in their saliva. The most striking finding was, so did their babies. The argument in the Holocaust survivors had been that their children show abnormal stress hormones because they themselves have been stressed by listening to these tales recounted by their parents of their awful exposures during the 1940s. That could not be the case with the 9/11 survivors. These babies were one year old.
Not only did infants had lower cortisol levels but they were different, depending on how pregnant the mother was on 9/11.
The main effect was only seen with those mothers with PTSD who were pregnant in the last third of pregnancy. Mothers with equal levels of PTSD who were pregnant in the first and second third of pregnancy at 9/11, there was very little effect on the babies' cortisol.
It suggested to us there couldn't just be about genetics, but there was something that was being transmitted in the late stages of pregnancy where the mother's symptoms were having some effect on the development of the offspring's cortisol system.

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