UK looks at MRI scans for PTSD

MRI testing on PTSD
MRI testing in America has revealed startling differences in the brains of soldiers with combat stress
# January 27, 2009 by admin1


Feeling the pressure: British troops in Afghanistan in 2007 Photo: PA
For the Ancient Greeks, it was a “divine madness” that infected the minds of soldiers. During the US Civil War, it became known as “soldier’s heart”. By the First World War it was called shell shock. Today, the condition is known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The idea that war can inflict deep and lasting psychological wounds is not new. In Sophocles’s tragedies, former soldiers descend into a state of mind that would be all too familiar to modern military psychiatrists. Yet despite the passage of more than 2,400 years, our understanding of PTSD has remained surprisingly unsophisticated: not only are the underlying biological and psychological causes poorly understood, but it is almost impossible to predict which soldiers are the most susceptible.

Now, however, new research from America – triggered by the soaring incidence of PTSD among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – has found striking differences in the brain patterns of those suffering from combat stress, raising hopes that we will be able to identify and treat sufferers much more effectively.

At the most basic level, PTSD is the result of a breakdown in the defence system that copes with traumatic and frightening experiences. After such events, most people will suffer what is known as Acute Stress Disorder, which involves symptoms of anxiety and depression. The majority will recover, but a minority go on to develop the chronic mental health problems that characterise PTSD.

“They get stuck in a cycle whereby recollections of a traumatic event are triggered by a particular situation they encounter,” explains Professor Simon Wessely, director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. “This triggers the symptoms, and they then try to avoid the situation that triggered the recollections – but that just means that the symptoms get worse the next time they encounter the same situation.”

“Those who develop PTSD are not necessarily the most vulnerable,” adds Professor Roberto Rona, a lecturer at King’s Psychological Medicine and Psychiatry Division. “Ideally, we would want to start treatment as soon as possible by separating those who are going to recover normally and those who will have a problem after a traumatic event.”
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