Stress: Case Study: The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944

 Dutch Hunger Winter

From the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945 reveals the suffer of the tragedy known as the ‘Dutch hunger winter.’ Remarkably depicted as a bitterly cold period in Western Europe causing a hardship on a continent that had been ruined from four-years of brutal war. Being under German control resulted in a catastrophic drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. In worse cases, the populations were given a situation to survive by only 30 percent of the normal daily calorie intake. For example, people ate grass, tulip bulbs, and burned every scrap of furniture they could get their hands on, to stay alive. By the time the food supplies were restored in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died.

The first participant was the effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during the devastation. If a mother was well fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. However, if the mother suffered malnutrition only for the first three months, but then was well fed, she was likely to have a normal size baby. 

As a result of this aspect, with continuous research of these groups of babies for decades, became essential. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. Even though they had access to food as much as they wanted later on, their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. On the other hand, children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy had higher obesity rates than normal. Even though those individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their devel­opment in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of gestation, a stage when the fetus is really very small and developing very rapidly, can affect an individual for the rest of his or her life. Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, that is, in the grandchildren of the women who were malnour­ished during the first three months of their pregnancy. Therefore, something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. That raised the really puzzling question of how those effects were passed on to subsequent generations.

The second participants were schizophrenia patient. This is a dreadful mental illness, which, if untreated, can completely overwhelm and disable an affected person.   Patients may present with a range of symptoms including delusions, hallucinations, and enormous difficulties focusing mentally. People with schizophrenia may become completely incapable of dis­tinguishing between the “real world” and their own hallucinatory and delusional realm. Normal cogni­tive, emotional, and societal responses are lost. There is a terrible misconception, however, that people with schizophrenia are likely to be violent and dangerous. For the great majority of patients that isn’t the case at all, and the people most likely to suffer harm because of this illness are the patients themselves. Individuals with schizophrenia are fifty times as likely to attempt suicide as healthy individuals. 

Schizophrenia is tragically common. It affects between 0.5 and 1 percent of the population in most countries and cultures, which means that there may be more than 50 million people alive today who are suffering from this condition. Scientists have known for some time that genetics plays a strong role in determining if a person will develop this illness. We know this because if one of a pair of identical twins has schizophrenia, there is a 50 percent chance that their twin will also have the condition. That is much higher than the 1 percent risk in the general population or even the 15 percent risk for fraternal twins. Identical twins have exactly the same genetic code as each other. They share the same womb, and usually they are brought up in very similar environments. When we consider this, it doesn’t seem surprising that if one of the twins develops schizophrenia, the chance that his or her twin will also develop the illness is very high. In fact, we have to start wondering why it isn’t higher. Flip a coin—heads they win, tails they lose. Variations in the environment are unlikely to account for this, and even if they did, how would those environmental effects have such profoundly different impacts on two genetically identical people?

The last case was a small child, less than three years old, is abused and neglected by his or her parents. Eventually, the state intervenes, and the child is taken away from the biological parents and placed with foster or adoptive parents. These new caregivers love and cherish the child, doing everything they can to create a secure home, full of affection. The child stays with these new parents throughout the rest of his or her childhood and adolescence, and into young adulthood.

As a result, sometimes everything works out well for such chil­dren. They grow up into happy, stable individuals indistinguishable from all their peers who had normal, non-abusive childhoods. But often, tragically, it doesn’t work out this way. Children who have suffered from abuse or neglect in their early years grow up with a substantially higher risk of adult mental health problems than the gen­eral population. All too often such a child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self-harm, drug abuse, and suicide. In some cases, the adult may have absolutely no recollection of the traumat­ic events, and yet he or she may suffer the consequences mentally and emotionally for the rest of life.

In conclusion, these three case studies seem very different on the surface. The first is mainly about nutrition, especially of the unborn child. The second is about the differences that arise between genetically identical individuals. The third is about long-term psychological damage as a result of childhood abuse.But these stories are linked at a very fundamental bio­logical level. They are all examples of epigenetics. Epigenetics is the new discipline that is revolutionizing biol­ogy. Whenever two genetically identical individuals are nonidentical in some way we can measure, this is called epigenetics. When a change in environment has biological consequences that last long after the event itself has vanished into distant memory, we are seeing an epigenetic effect in action.