PTSD Research
Marla Keown | March 17, 2006 03:24 PM | Link
Dustin Crook isn’t your normal University of Kansas freshman. While Crook deals with the daily stress of an academic lifestyle like studying for midterms and writing papers, he also has to cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Last year, Crook returned home to Kansas after serving a year in Kuwait and Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom II. “When you’re over there, you concentrate on getting the job done, and not how the RPG (rocket propelled grenades) that just missed your truck is going to affect your stress levels a year down the road” says Crook.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, isn’t confined only to combat exposure. According to Wikipedia.com, PTSD is a term used for “certain psychological consequences of exposure to or confrontation with stressful experiences that a person experiences as highly traumatic.” There are a variety of different experiences that are likely to induce PTSD such as: adult experiences of rape, war, or combat, natural catastrophes, violent attacks, or even physical or emotional abuse during childhood.
Dr. Gerardo Villarreal, the Medical Director of New Mexico’s VA Healthcare System and PTSD Program, hopes to learn more about PTSD through the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). MRIs are used to visualize the insides of living organisms. With the help of Dr. William Brooks, director of Hoglund Brain Imaging Center in Kansas City, KS and Department Professor of Neurology, Villarreal and a team of other professionals recently completed a study on PTSD.
According to Brooks, “little research is being done in the field of PTSD”, but it’s the little steps made by researchers to not only better understand the disorder, but to find ways to deal with it. Brooks and Villarreal worked together on two studies concerning Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Both studies looked at images of the brain in patients with PTSD and their corresponding control twins.
Villarreal sampled patients with a variety of traumas ranging from combat exposure to childhood sexual abuse. These patients, twelve total, were compared to a control group of similar subjects without the disorder. According to Brooks, “we found matching patients without PTSD.” Because so many different things affect our brains, it was important to find an opposing ‘twin’ to the PTSD patients. Sex, age, and even drug and alcohol use of both control and test groups were matched up.
Both studies led to interesting results. Patients with PTSD have smaller corpus callosum and hippocampal volumes than their control group twins. The corpus callosum is the largest white matter structure in the human brain. According to Villarreal, “the corpus callosum is a white matter structure that connects the two brain hemispheres and allows communication between them.”
Still not making any sense? Try thinking of the corpus callosum in computer terms. The corpus callosum is like your computer’s CPU (central processing unit). The CPU interprets instructions and processes data contained in software. The lack of good communication between the left and right hemispheres of your brain is like having a bad CPU, your computer just doesn’t work the way it should.
The hippocampus is “largely responsible for the mechanics of memory” says Brooks. Humans have two hippocampi, one in each side of the brain. The worse your hippocampi are, the worse your memory.
The lower corpus callosum and hippocampi volume in PTSD patients is more than just your average brain deterioration, which happens naturally with age. “There is normal atrophy (decreased white matter volume) with age, but our findings suggest this is accelerated in PTSD” says Villarreal.
The big question lies in figuring out which factors are the causes and which are the effects. “Lots of people experience traumatic events, but only a small percentage of these people have PTSD” says Brooks. In other words, are people with smaller corpus callosums or hippocampi more vulnerable to develop PTSD after the trauma? Or are traumatic events and PTSD causing some type of brain damage that explains the lower volumes of the corpus callosums and hippocampi?
The only way to answer these questions is through further examination. More and more, students are being called up to serve overseas in combat situations. Through research similar to Villarreal’s and Brook’s, students such as Dustin Crook have a better chance of overcoming PTSD and dealing with more important ‘stressors’, like earning a bachelors degree.
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