RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A study done at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in collaboration with Swedish researchers suggests that women have a higher genetic predisposition to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The study, which was done by a team of researchers from VCU and Lund University in Sweden, involved examining data from over 16,000 sets of Swedish twins and 376,000 pairs of Swedish siblings — making it the largest-ever twin-sibling study done on PTSD to date.
The researchers found that the heritability of PTSD was 35.4% in women, but just 28.6% in men. They also found evidence suggesting that the genes that make up the heritable risk for PTSD vary between men and women.
“Women are at higher risk for developing PTSD than men, even when controlling for the type of trauma, income level, social support and other environmental factors,” said Ananda B. Amstadter, lead author of the study and a professor with the VCU School of Medicine’s departments of Psychiatry and Human and Molecular Genetics. “Some of the theories as to why that is have frankly been unkind to women, such as attributing the sex difference to a weakness or lack of ability to cope. I think this study can help move the narrative that people can have an inherited biological risk for PTSD, and that this genetic risk is greater in women.”
According to VCU, nearly 70% of people across the world have experienced a traumatic event in their lives — and around 6% of those people develop PTSD.
“If you think of risk for PTSD like a pie chart, we’re trying to better understand what factors make up the pieces of this pie,” Amstadter said. “Some of the risk is influenced by a person’s environment, such as the experiences they have while growing up. On the other hand, some of the risk will be influenced by the genes they inherit from their parents.”
The study, which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, can be found here.
