Rwandans conceived through genocidal rape show the largest shift in newer epigenetic clocks

Between April and July 1994, during the genocide against the Tutsi, an estimated 2,000 to 10,000 children were conceived through rape, according to figures the authors cite. A team from Western University in Canada, and Dartmouth College in the US met some of them at 24 and looked for a trace of that beginning in DNA methylation.

Three groups of 24-year-olds

Of the 91 participants, 31 had mothers who lived through the genocide while pregnant, 30 were conceived through genocidal rape, and 30 were controls of Rwandan descent whose mothers were abroad in 1994. Most exposed participants came via organisations that support survivors and their children. Dried blood spots collected in 2019 were run through seven epigenetic clocks, from Horvath and Hannum to the fourth-generation YingDamAge and YingAdaptAge, and the models were adjusted for adverse childhood experiences.

Where the clocks diverged

The older clocks saw nothing. On YingDamAge, which tracks damage-related ageing, the coefficient was 3.601 for the genocide-exposed group and 6.375 for the rape-conceived group. On YingAdaptAge, which tracks adaptive ageing, the coefficients were -6.482 and -7.725, and -7.450 and -9.436 after adjustment for childhood adversity. On GrimAge the difference for the rape-conceived group, 1.448, fell to 0.93 (p = 0.25) with that adjustment.

Asking how a client was conceived

I read this paper mainly as a reason to treat people conceived through wartime rape as a clinical group in their own right. The signal was strongest in them and held after their own childhood adversity was counted. The authors write that the stress tied to their origins did not end with the genocide and ran through childhood. They also note that some people conceived this way may not know it.

In practice, the circumstances of conception belong in the assessment of any client born to a survivor of wartime sexual violence. The question is asked once there is trust, framed as an invitation to say what the family has told, and the client decides how far to go.