CHILD abuse appears to leave chemical “caps” on victims’ genes that last into adulthood and which may help to trigger suicide.
Last year, and his colleagues at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found that in people who had been abused and later committed suicide, more genes were “switched off” in brain tissue taken from the hippocampus – a region involved in mood control – compared with people who had not been abused and who had died in other ways.
To see if these differences might be linked to the abuse itself or to suicidal tendencies in general, the team has…
