Archival ReportPosttraumatic Stress Disorder Across Two Generations: Concordance and Mechanisms in a Population-Based Sample
Section snippets
Sample
We assess the relationship between maternal and child PTSD in 2 longitudinal cohorts, the Nurses' Health Study II (NHSII), a cohort of women, and the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), a cohort of their children. The NHSII is a cohort of 116,430 female nurses from 14 populous U.S. states whose nursing boards were able to provide information on nurses' gender and birth date. Because the goal of the NHSII was to establish a long-term longitudinal cohort, only the most responsive potential
Results
Mothers in our sample were a mean age of 55 years in 2008, as were women in the whole NHSII. Mothers in our sample were somewhat more likely to be white (98% vs. 95%), less likely to be Hispanic (1.5% vs. 1.9%), and were more likely to have been married at baseline (95% vs. 77%) compared with the whole NHSII. Children in our study were the same mean age, 12 years, as the whole GUTS sample at baseline. Children in our sample were slightly less likely to be Hispanic (1.4% vs. 1.6%) and more
Discussion
Our results suggest that risk for PTSD may be transmitted intergenerationally in a large population-based sample. We found a dose–response relationship: women who had experienced high levels of PTSD symptoms during their life had children at higher risk of PTSD compared with women with lower levels of PTSD symptoms. Elevated exposure to traumatic events in children of mothers with PTSD was likely a major mechanism for this risk transmission. However, we found that mother's PTSD symptoms
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