Brain scans show changes after combat

When I do presentations I talk about how survivors of traumatic events walk away one of two ways. Either they were saved, spared by God and glad to be alive or they think they were abandoned by God, judged and the trauma was brought into their lives as punishment.

For the first group, they are touched by the event and most of the time changed by it in a more positive way than a negative one. For the other group when they feel as if there is no one watching over them, it takes over.

What's more, the investigators observed that neural activity in the region of the brain that is responsible for emotional regulation differed among the deployed soldiers. The kind of changes that took place depended on how the soldiers perceived the experiences to which they were exposed, the study authors noted. For example, the degree to which a soldier perceived a roadside bomb explosion to be a threat predicted the degree of activity change in their brain's emotional control center.

One time, they can manage to heal easier than the next time. Too many times it piles up on them and is less likely to be healed alone. Feeling alone is part of the problem in itself.

The following study looked at soldiers before and after deployment using brain scans.

Stress of War Spurs Changes in Brain Activity, Study Finds
Scans show that regions that control fear, vigilance, emotion affected by deployment
Posted: January 24, 2011
MONDAY, Jan. 24 (HealthDay News) -- Continual exposure to stress prompts neural activity changes in those parts of the brain that control fear, vigilance and emotion, a new study suggests.


The finding stems from an analysis of brain scans taken among troops recently deployed to Afghanistan, and is reported in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

"For the first time we can now conclude that the effects on the brain really are due to experiences in combat," study first author Guido van Wingen, of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, said in a university news release.
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Stress of War Spurs Changes in Brain Activity, Study Finds