A traumatic life experience in childhood is a fundamental risk factor of numerous psychiatric disorders. Recently, studies try to evaluate the mental health consequences on victims’ offspring, but few psychiatric disorders were examined, and whether these results apply to the general population remains unknown.

In this study, we use the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, a large representative sample of American population, in order to estimate the impact on the offspring of a traumatic experience in parents. Besides, we use a well-known risk factor for offspring's psychiatric disorder: a familial history of a psychiatric disorder, in order to compare and assess the importance of parental traumatism as a risk factor for the offspring.

Our results show that the five psychiatric disorders studied, alcohol use disorder, substance use disorder, mood disorder, antisocial personality disorder and anxiety disorder, are more prevalent in the offspring, when at least one parent report a traumatic life event in his own childhood. Moreover, the magnitude of this risk factor is close to the magnitude of having a parental history of psychiatric disorder.

童年时期遭受创伤的生活经历是许多精神疾病的基本危险因素。最近，研究试图评估对受害者后代的心理健康影响，但是很少检查精神疾病，这些结果是否适用于普通人群仍然未知。

在这项研究中，我们使用了《全国酒精及相关疾病流行病学调查》（美国人口的代表性样本），以估算父母遭受创伤经历对后代的影响。此外，我们使用众所周知的后代精神病风险因素：精神病的家族史，以比较和评估父母外伤作为后代风险因素的重要性。

我们的结果表明，所研究的五种精神疾病，即饮酒障碍，物质滥用障碍，情绪障碍，反社会人格障碍和焦虑症在后代中更为普遍，至少有一位父母在其童年时期报告了一次创伤性生活事件。而且，该危险因素的大小接近具有父母精神病史的大小。