‘Dementia link to sudden low blood pressure and dizziness’
October 13, 2024
Israeli scientists found ‘post-traumatic growth’ enabled Holocaust survivors to develop enhanced ‘personal and inter-personal skills’ Researchers from Haifa University in Israel found a phenomenon known as ‘post-traumatic growth’ enabled Holocaust survivors to develop enhanced ‘personal and inter-personal skills’.
As a result, male survivors lived up to 18 months longer than Jewish peers who were not confined to concentration camps during the war. Holocaust survivors also gained ‘new insights and a deeper meaning to life’ as a result of their intense psychological ordeal inside the concentration camps, the scientists said.
The study of more than 55,220 Polish Jews found men and women who escaped before Hitler started his campaign of terror had an average life expectancy 6.5 months shorter than those who made it to Israel between the armistice and 1950.
Study leader, Professor Avi Sagi-Schwartz, from the Department of Psychology at Haifa University in Israel, said he was ‘surprised’ by the finding that male survivors lived for up to 18 months longer.
He said: ‘Holocaust survivors not only suffered grave psychosocial trauma but also famine, malnutrition, and lack of hygienic and medical facilities, leading us to believe these damaged their later health and reduced life expectancy. ‘Surprisingly, our findings teach us of the strength and resilience of the human spirit’.
A common belief among scientists is that psychological trauma shortens life expectancy by damaging the victims’s DNA by shortening their ‘chromosome ends’ which control the lifespan of cells in the body.
This inspired the research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, which is the first of its kind to use the official database of the National Insurance Institute of Israel to look at the entire Jewish population who emigrated before and after World War Two.
It compared Holocaust survivors who were between four and 20-years-old when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and found that among the women there was ‘no significant difference’ among the female population of Holocaust survivors.
However, among the men who survived Hitler’s mass extermination, life expectancy was 14 months longer than the refugees who escaped.
The team found that the older the men in the group caught up in the Holocaust were, the longest their life expectancy.
Professor Sagi-Schwartz said: ‘Men who were 10 to 15-years-old during the war and in their early adolescence had a 10 month longer life-expectancy, compared to the comparison group.
‘Men who lived through the Holocaust when they were 16 to 20, had an even bigger difference in life-expectancy, 18 months longer than their peers with no Holocaust experience.
‘The results of this research give us hope and teach us quite a bit about the resilience of the human spirit when faced with brutal and traumatic events.’
Source The Mail Online