A group of 74 US veterans has been involved in clinical trials which appear to have objectively diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something conventional brain scans, be it X-ray, CT or MRI, have thus far failed to do.

The findings, published today, Wednesday, 20 January, in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Neural Engineering, have sprung from advances in magnetoencephalography (MEG), a non-invasive measurement of magnetic fields in the brain. [continue reading…]

Women are joining the military in record numbers. Of the 1.8 million troops that have been deployed in the Iraq–Afghanistan conflict, 200 thousand of them are women. 120 of them have died, over 600 have been wounded. But hundreds more have come home with wounds that are harder to see. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, “is best thought of as a disorder of recovery,” says Dr. Natara Garovoy who runs the Women’s Mental Health Clinic at the Veteran’s Administration in Palo Alto, California, and women are twice as likely as men to suffer from it. She says that when “someone experiences something traumatic, basically life threatening in some way” that event can really stay with them and make sleeping, socializing and working difficult. “Lives are lost, relationships are damaged-people have a hard time working…they drop out of school and they start to isolate…the very life they were hoping to lead kind of disappears,” she adds.

Source: CNN

After exposure to extreme life stresses, what distinguishes the individuals who do and do not develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? A new study, published in the October 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggests that it has something to do with the way that we control the activity of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region thought to orchestrate our thoughts and actions. [continue reading…]