egg2 by Chris27 of the UK courtesy stockXchng
The results of a just-released Duke University study suggest that people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, suffer severe cognitive impairment. Specifically, patients with PTSD who underwent MRI brain scans during a test exhibited signs of impaired cognitive processing.
Combat veterans with PTSD as well as combat veterans without PTSD underwent MRI brain scans while they were shown a series of portraits. During the series, the patients were distracted with other pictures of combat, non-combat pictures, and some non-sensical pictures. When PTSD patients were distracted, they showed activity in their ventral cortex — regions of the brain associated with emotional processing. At the same time, brain areas in the prefrontal cortex, associated with working (short-term memory) and attention, “showed deactivation related to controls.” In otherwords, PTSD patients had a hard-time retaining what they were supposed to retain while they were being emotionally distracted by pictures that had nothing to do with the task at hand.
This discovery corresponds with the well-known symptom of PTSD known as hypervigilance. PTSD sufferers’ hypervigilance, a continual stress response state of “on,” leads us to regard many fairly innocent situations as threatening ones, and over-react, often with rage. The study suggests that PTSD involves a severe disruption in the regular information processing functions of the brain.
Dr. Rajendra Morey of Duke University, one of the study researchers, said a symptom like hypervigilance could be the result of an impaired brain misinterpreting information. While such a study doesn’t help us undo such brain damage, it does suggest that we may eventually be able to “re-program” the brains of PTSD patients so that they process information correctly.
Until then, I guess, we’re still all a bit, um, cracked. Of course my family knew that already. Thank you, I’m here all week.
