This is horribly disconcerting. In general the implications are that survivors of severe trauma pass on hormonal alterations to their children, I wonder how many generations this can be observed for.
I don't know about humans, but in mice, epigenetic obesity has been observed for 6 generations. (Also, not sure about epigenetic stress response, but I suspect it's similar.)
I'm struggling to find the bit in this[1] set of lectures where something like this was mentioned (I only got to #15 so far); not this study of course, but something about rats being more prone to stress (he was more specific than that) depending on how stressed their mother was (again, that's how I remember it), and that it takes 4-5 generations for that to return to "normal". The logic being that if stress leads to passing on "lower stress tolerance" or however you want to call it, that in turn leads to the offspring being more stressed, which in turn makes their offspring more prone to stress.
I know this may be something totally unrelated, like comparing a jpeg to a wav file, I have no clue about this subject really. It's just this "similar thing that this reminded me of" :)
It's both good and bad. It's more proof that at least some life experiences can produce heritable traits - typically called Lamarckism, and long considered a discredited contender as an evolutionary theory. Whether these traits are good or bad depends on the life experiences I suppose.
It's a bit debated whether modern epigenetics vindicates some elements of Lamarckism or not. Or at least it was a debate in the 2000s; I haven't followed it recently. The consensus is probably no, but the question isn't entirely obvious. Some books by Marion J. Lamb and Eva Jablonka are probably the best-known arguments that results from epigenetics pose a challenge to the gene-centered neo-Darwinian account of evolution, and have stirred debate. One response among many, taking the opposite view, although in a fairly nuanced manner: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372...
