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A new study conducted on mice by researchers from Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM) suggests that a woman's risk of anxiety and dysfunctional social behavior may be determined by the experiences of her parents, particularly fathers, when they were young.

According to the study, stress caused by chronic social instability during childhood could cause epigenetic changes in sperm cells which can in turn lead to psychiatric disorders in female offspring for many generations to come. 

"The long-term effects of stress can be pernicious. We first found that adolescent mice exposed to chronic social instability, where the cage composition of mice is constantly changing, exhibited anxious behavior and poor social interactions through adulthood. These changes were especially prominent in female mice," said first author Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow in the Larry Feig laboratory at Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM), in the news release.

When researchers studied the offspring of these mice which were stressed at a young age, they found that female and not male offspring exhibited an increased level of anxiety and poor social interactions.

Even though the male mice did not exhibit any behavioral changes themselves, the behavior was passed on to their female offspring. The mice mated with a non-stressed female. This behavior was passed on to not only one but even to the next generation of females. 

"We are presently searching for biochemical changes in the sperm of stressed fathers that could account for this newly appreciated form of inheritance" said senior author Larry A. Feig, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry at Tufts University School of Medicine and member of the biochemistry and neuroscience program faculties at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University, according to Medical Xpress.

 "Hopefully, this work will stimulate efforts to determine whether similar phenomena occur in humans."

The study was published online in Biological Psychiatry.