Studies of DNA methylation have revealed the biological mechanisms by which life adversity confers risk for later physical and mental health problems. What remains unknown is the “biologically embedding” of maternal adverse experiences resulting in maladaptive parenting and whether these epigenetic effects are transmitted to the next generation. This study focuses on neglectful mothering indexed by a severe disregard for the basic and psychological needs of the child. Using the Illumina Human Methylation 850K BeadChip in saliva samples, we identified genes with differentially methylated regions (DMRs) in those mothers with, versus those without, neglectful behavior (n = 51 vs 87) that present similar DMRs patterns in their children being neglected versus non-neglected (n = 40 vs 75). Mothers reported the emotional intensity of adverse life events. After covariate adjustment and multiple testing corrections, we identified 69 DMRs in the mother epigenome and 42 DMRs in the child epigenome that were simultaneously above the α = 0.01 threshold. The common set of nine DMRs contained genes related to childhood adversity, neonatal and infant diabetes, child neurobehavioral development, and other health problems such as obesity, hypertension, cancer, posttraumatic stress, and Alzheimer’s disease; four of the genes were associated with maternal life adversity. Identifying a shared epigenetic signature of neglect linked to maternal life adversity is an essential step in breaking the intergenerational transmission of one of the most common forms of childhood maltreatment.

This dataset show Beta values from methylation sequencing from saliva samples. Only the beta samples of the regions analyzed in the paper are shown. 

The data is a collection of .rds files containing the Beta values. For each row of Table 2 of the main text (referred to as the different genes), we extracted the Beta values for the differential methylated CpGs between the two groups of mothers. Those CpGs correspond within the genomic positions defined in that table by the column Genomic coordinates (Start and End). The data was separated by files corresponding to the mothers for each gene and children per each gene. Two files provide the label for each mother according to her group of belonging (control or neglectful) (GroupMothers.rds and GroupChildren.rds).

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