Depression in kids of divorce blamed on Genes

Tweet

Numerous studies have found that growing up in a broken home increases a person's risk of developing depression or having problems with anxiety late in life. But divorce isnt at the root of the offspring's depression after all. In fact, the study, published in the July issue of the Journal of Child Psychological and Psychiatry, found that the cause of the divorce and the depression might be the same: shared genes. The increased risk of emotional problems in the offspring of divorced parent is due to genetic risk shared by parents and their offspring. This is contrary to what a lot of people have assumed in sociology and psychology. Researchers teased out the contributions of genetics and divorce using a new twist on an old strategy- the twin study. Twin studies are one approach to disentangling the contributions of the genes and environment. Scientists compare identical twins - who are perfect genetic replicas of one another - to fraternal twins, who share smaller amounts of DNA. If there is a genetic root to the trait being studied, then the identical twins will be more similar than the fraternal twins.