A study led by Pia Heppner, Ph.D., psychologist with the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs of San Diego, VA Center of Excellence for Stress and Mental Health (CESAMH), has found that veterans with PTSD are more likely to also meet the criteria for metabolic syndrome, a currently controversial diagnosis that includes elevated BP, higher waist-to-hip ratios and high fasting concentrations of HDLs, glucose and triglycerides. Metabolic syndrome is associated with obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, otherwise known as the diseases fat people get.

So that explains it. HA!

In their press release, researchers concluded:

“Our research indicates that stress and post-stress responses are related to long-term health outcomes,” said Heppner. Studies show that veterans, prisoners of war and individuals exposed to severe trauma have higher rates of disease and increased use of health care, she continued. “Our findings suggest that metabolic syndrome provides a useful framework for assessing and describing the physical burden of PTSD and can be used prospectively to evaluate health risk that may be associated with combat exposure and PTSD.”

If they can’t kill you one way, they’ll try another. Sometimes it seems there is no respite anywhere.

Things grow in the mind, especially in the curious mind denied. When you’re a kid, and you want to know something, and an adult won’t tell you, it’s the worst tease in the universe. Nothing is worse than being told that you can’t know something; the thing you want to know won’t go away then. It grows in your mind like a storm cloud, like a tumor, like a pimple; you gnaw on it voraciously, returning again and again to the thing you can’t worry free.

When I was a kid, the things that scared me also fascinated me, and even when I was six, seven, eight or nine years old, I recognized that I had frightening gaps in my memory that didn’t make sense. I would remember part of a thing, sometimes colors or smells, or feelings, or one specific bit of it, but the rest of it would slip away. Things that happened to me that I wanted to remember seemed to be tantalizingly just out of reach, on the tip of my tongue, just around the corner… in the darkness. Worst about these not-memories were that other people and places would remind me, in a frightening way, of things but I didn’t know what they were.

I cat-sat for a couple in our trailer park one time, and nosing about their home like a kid would, I discovered a stash of porno mags. Opening one of them to an illustrated story in which a woman was stroking a man filled me with a nameless horror, a fear in the pit of my stomach that made me want to tear up the magazine. But I didn’t know why. For thirty years I lived with these no-memories. And the person who could have illuminated them, even just a little, refused to tell me why there were such gaping black holes of terror in my mind. Her answer was always, “If you only knew, you would …”

• If you only knew, you would thank me for getting you out of there.
• If you only knew, you would understand why I am so afraid for you.
• If you only knew, you wouldn’t scare me like that.

I have a lot of emotions in my heart for my mother. My fury is the hardest one of all to deal with. I try to exorcise it, day by day, with grateful patience for my life and with understanding. But it’s hard. It can be really, really hard.

Sometimes the memories come, and you don’t know why.

A shadow from another time is waiting in the night.

Something happened long ago. Something that will not let go.

Bury my lovely; hide in your room.

Bury my lovely; forget me soon.

Forget me, forget me now. Forget me … not.

When I first heard this song by October Project, I knew it was about people like me and Svasti. Hang in there, kid.

A study of PTSD sufferers and heart problems found that women who exhibited five or more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were three times more likely to have heart disease than women without PTSD. The study, lead by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Laura D. Kubzansky, analyzed data from more than a thousand women who averaged 44 years of age at the start of a 14-year study of psychiatric disorders in the general population.

The theory is that the prolonged wear and tear on the body from the heightened arousal states of PTSD cause a faster breakdown of the body, leading to the disease. Depression and anxiety have already been implicated in heart disease, especially in women, but the exact biological mechanism—how stress breaks down tissue, or if it does, how fast, and if it can be stopped or halted—is not yet known.

Dr. Kubzansky’s work is important because it shows that not just military men, but civilian women, suffer from PTSD and the side effects that go with it. Incidentally, I have a heart condition as well—mild for now, exhibiting as high blood pressure controlled with medication—but I certainly feel my personal story bears out this interesting research. Dr. Kubzansky also studies whether positive therapies can affect heart patients, and does studies on breathing therapies and optimism in patients with chronic conditions.