A study on the survivors of the massive 1988 earthquake that killed 17,000 people in Armenia, and destroyed nearly half the town of Gumri, has revealed that vulnerability to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety may be inherited through genes.

Armen Goenjian, a research psychiatrist in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied 200 participants from 12 multigenerational families exposed to the earthquake.

The researcher revealed that the subjects suffered from varying degrees of the disorders.

Reporting their findings in the journal Psychiatric Genetics, he and his colleagues revealed that 41 percent of the variation of PTSD symptoms was due to genetic factors.

They also said that 61 percent of the variation of depressive symptoms and 66 percent of anxiety symptoms were attributable to genetics.

The team added that they found that a large proportion of the genetic liabilities for the disorders were shared.

"This was a study of multigenerational family members - parents and offspring, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings, and so on - and we found that the genetic makeup of some of these individuals renders them more vulnerable to develop PTSD, anxiety and depressive symptoms," said Goenjian, a member of the UCLA-Duke University National Center for Child Traumatic Stress and lead author of the study.

According to him, the study suggests that a large percentage of genes are shared between the disorders.