The title of the article is “Parental characteristics and offspring mental health and related outcomes: A systematic review of genetically informative literature.” It was published in the Translational Psychiatry journal on April 1, 2021, by Eshim S. Jami. Anke R. Hammerschlag, Meike Bartels, and Christel M. Middeldorp. This journal is an international peer-reviewed site for medical research publications, and it belongs to the Nature Publishing Group.
This article was a systematic review of literature related to the field of offspring mental health outcomes associations with genetic and environmental impact. The authors explored this topic because even if twin studies were done to demonstrate a moderate relationship between psychiatric issues and inheritance, these researches could not articulate mechanisms of disease transmission. Therefore, they decided to synthesize the available knowledge about children’s mental health outcomes and their parents’ characteristics by evaluating the genetics-related studies.
Since this was a systematic literature review, no laboratory or clinical experiments were performed. Instead, the search for scholarly articles was done on the Web of Science database, only including articles from 2014 to 2020 (Jami et al., 2021). The keywords used to find articles were “adoption,” “offspring of twins,” “genetic comparison,” “genetic nurture,” “assisted conception,” “sibling comparison,” and some other terms (Jami et al., 2021). The 89 papers included in this research discussed substance use and personality, externalizing and internalizing behaviors, and educational achievement (Jami et al., 2021). All selected studies had interpretable statistical data and reasonable sample sizes.
This literature review found that there is a correlation between parental behavior and psychiatric issues with the mental health outcomes in their offspring. Specifically, studies showed a statistically significant association between major depressive disorder in biological parents and children (Jami et al., 2021). However, the same connection could not be established in the case of anxiety because only “40% of individual differences in anxiety are explained by genetic factors” (Jami et al., 2021, p. 17). Moreover, the authors found that research demonstrated a strong correlation between maternal smoking and alcohol abuse with the development of anxiety disorder and aggression, respectively, in offspring (Jami et al., 2021). Furthermore, according to the authors of this paper, some studies found that criminal behavior was both environmentally and genetically transmissible.
Another essential finding of this literature review was that a supportive approach to parenting could diminish the rate of the development of various mental health problems. This study revealed that regardless of genetic relations between parents and children, the latter achieved higher academic results if their caregivers were well-educated (Jami et al., 2021). It appears that some traits have a direct genetic causative effect on offspring, while other characteristics can be altered due to environmental influence.
Since the influence of childhood on behaviors, attitudes, success, and failures in adult life is substantial, the implications of this research are immeasurable. Specifically, these findings may be used to prevent and correct mental health issues in children because the presented literature review demonstrated that many seemingly purely genetic problems could be altered due to environmental impact. For instance, positive parenting seems to have a protective effect against some psychiatric issues (Jami et al., 2021). The limitation of this research is that conducting a systematic review is insufficient to give a definitive answer to the question about the relationship between offspring mental health, genetics, and environment. Therefore, I wonder if a meta-analysis could be conducted to perform a statistical assessment of the results in the reviewed articles.
Reference
Jami, E. S., Hammerschlag, A. R., Bartels, M., & Middeldorp, C. M. (2021). Parental characteristics and offspring mental health and related outcomes: A systematic review of genetically informative literature. Translational Psychiatry, 11(1), 1-38.