Anxiety starts at around 11 years of age,affects nearly a third of the population, and is known to dash in families. So is it your fault whether your child is terrified of spiders or fearful about flying?It is enough to worry any parent. whether you show your child you are anxious, and will they grow up to be fearful too? I absorb a keen interest in the long-standing debate on how much anxiety is genetic versus environmental: “You’ll absorb your eye out with that,” was my father’s favourite phrase. It is known that anxiety runs in families. But since anxiety can be debilitating, affects up to 30% of people and starts on average at the age of 11, or it would be helpful to know whether parenting styles perform a difference. A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry this month compares levels of anxiety in families of identical twins with those of non-identical twins. There were 385 identical and 486 non-identical twin families in the survey,all part of the Swedish Twin and Offspring Study.
The study was designed to find out how much genetic factors cause anxiety compared with non-genetic ones. whether cousins whose parents were identical twins were more likely to absorb anxiety than those whose cousins had parents who were non-identical twins, then genetics would be the stronger suspect.
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Source: theguardian.com