Soldiers’ Amygdalae Show Scars

I usually describe PTSD as if it was an infection. A cut can lead to an infection if the cut is not treated. Trauma is a cut. It is an outside force hitting the soldier. Treat it early and pretty much cure it. Wait and it digs deeper, spreading out to more parts of the life of the soldier. Much like an infection, it grows and eats more healthy territory. Once treated, it stops spreading. What is left behind is healed parts along with a scar. The scar cannot be healed and that is the part of PTSD that cannot be reversed. The healing happens to the rest of the life. Now we have the ability to see into the minds and see the scars left behind.

Soldiers’ Amygdalae Show Scars
A year and a half after soldiers have returned from war, impairments in the regulatory circuitry of the amygdala remain.
By Kerry Grens | August 30, 2011

A chronically overactive amygdala, the brain region involved in fear, is a hallmark of an unhealthy response to traumatic events. New research, published today (August 30) in Molecular Psychiatry, shows that some soldiers—who have no mental health deficits after a return from deployment—also harbor signs of trauma within the regulatory network of this brain region.

The findings could help researchers determine “what changes [in the brain] help us predict who becomes sick and who recovers and leads a normal life,” said Ahmad Hariri, a professor at Duke University who was not involved in this study.

The amygdala mediates humans’ fear response, and researchers have found that its overreaction is related to psychological disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety and depression. People with PTSD, for example, have heightened activity in the amygdala when they are exposed to potential stressors, such as images of threatening faces.

In the new study, the researchers compared 23 Dutch combat soldiers who had been deployed to Afghanistan with 16 soldiers who stayed home. They measured brain activity using fMRI as the soldiers were exposed to angry or fearful faces.

The findings revealed different neural responses to the faces depending on how much fear the soldiers experienced—and not necessarily how much combat they were in. Immediately after returning from Afghanistan, those soldiers who reported feeling the greatest threat abroad displayed the most activity in the amygdala when they viewed the faces. Soldiers who didn’t feel as threatened had a less sensitive amygdala.
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