epi genetics

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I was looking at a doco about epi genetics and it was interesting, to say the least.

I as a mother of a teen daughter who is just with a diagnoses of aspergers cannot help but feel I caused this during my pregnancy.
It was filled with fear for a lot of the time. Not just being afraid, but in the panic feeling of immediate danger type fear.

I realised I had a low rubella protection count, a bleed- threatening miscarriage,
horrid throracic pain and from this I developed a phobia of cancer during my pregnancy. You can imagine the cortisol racing through my pregnant body and to my unborn child

She was born 5 weeks prematurely with a bowel perforation and obstruction. Surgery saved her life.

This epi genetics talks about the state of the pregnant woman, during the Great Depression and famine and they proved high anxiety can cause problems with the unborn child.

I know I caused my daughters aspergers during pregnancy. I seriously thought I was going to die from cancer.

I HIGHLY DOUBT you caused aspergers...so much so that I'm more inclined to think that aliens violated you while your were sleeping, and microinjected into your ova autistic mRNA.

If elevated cortisol alone leads to aspergers, our species probably would have never existed. Our non-human, as well as early human, ancestors literally fought for their lives nearly every minute they even had a life: starving to find food, dyeing of thirst to find water, being constantly on the lookout for predators in dark of night, as well as in the shade of the jungle, who wanted nothing less than to rip out their jugular, and gnaw on their flesh. Diseases and infections from eating raw/undercooked flesh of sick animals, bacteria from fecal matter and rotting biomass in water supplies. Open sores on their feet and hands that enabled the direct colonization of pathogens. Need I go on?

So...sorry to say...but a 9-12-16-18-24-36-48-100 month cancer scare is virtually meaningless when put into a more global context.

So, no...that is not why your child has aspergers. Nor was it the vaccines you got as a child, or those you allowed to be given to your own child.

Yes, hormones can modify chromatin structure, altering the accessibility polymerases to promoter regions and/or exon sequence, endonucleases and/or spliceosomes to intron splice junctions, and even trans-acting factors, such as smRNA or those associated with any number of protein complexes involved with transcriptional and/or translational machinery. But so too can xenobiotics...oxidative stress...retroviral activity...mobile element translocations...ectopic recombination...etc.

SO STOP BEATING YOURSELF UP.

Unless you KNEW a priori that there was a moderate-to-high probability that you, or your baby-daddy, carried disease associated alleles... yet ignored this fact, and subsequently failed to seeking guidance from a genetic counselor before getting, and maintaining the state of being, preggo...you are no more guilty of creating your child's condition that you are of creating the (thankfully now past) Justin Beiber craze.