Can daughters inherit depression from their mothers? Looks like it
Mother-daughter connections are particularly intense – and now a study offers a explanation for this.
The study's findings suggest that the corticolimbic system in a mother’s brain – the part responsible for regulating emotion – can exercise a strong genetic influence on the development of the same system in their daughters.
Researchers at the University of California-San Francisco analysed the grey matter volume in the corticolimbic system of the members of 35 families, including parents and their biological children. None of the subjects had a diagnosis of depression.
They found that the volumes of the system showed a closer correspondence from mothers to daughters than from mothers to sons or from fathers to children of either gender. This suggests that proneness to depression may also travel on the mother-daughter axis.
“Many factors play a role in depression – genes that are not inherited from the mother, social environment and life experiences, to name only three. Mother-daughter transmission is just one piece of it,” explained Dr Fumiko Hoeft, who lead the study.
“But this is the first study to bridge animal and human clinical research and show a possible matrilineal transmission of human corticolimbic circuitry, which has been implicated in depression, by scanning both parents and offspring.”