Word: kendler
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Eventually, researchers would like to learn what role our genes, as opposed to our environment, play in the development of anxiety. "It has been known for some time that these disorders run in families," says Kenneth Kendler, a psychiatric geneticist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va. "So the next logical question is the nature-nurture issue." In other words, are anxious people born that way, or do they become anxious as a result of their life experiences...
...Kendler and his colleagues approached the question by studying groups of identical twins, who share virtually all their genes, and fraternal twins, who, like any other siblings, share only some of them. What Kendler's group found was that both identical twins were somewhat more likely than both fraternal twins to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, phobias or panic attacks. (The researchers have not yet studied twins with post-traumatic stress disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder...
...correlation isn't 100%, however. "Most of the heritability is in the range of 30% to 40%," Kendler says. That's a fairly moderate genetic impact, he notes, akin to the chances that you will have the same cholesterol count as your parents. "Your genes set your general vulnerability," he concludes. "You can be a low-vulnerable, intermediate-vulnerable or a high-vulnerable person." But your upbringing and your experiences still have a major role to play. Someone with a low genetic vulnerability, for example, could easily develop a fear of flying after surviving a horrific plane crash...