NIH study shows brain injuries prevent post-traumatic stress disorder
In the ongoing quest to understand and treat war injuries, the NIH has shown that certain organic .jpg)
injury to the brain actually reduces the the occurence of non-organic injury.
NINDS is a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and is the nation's primary supporter of biomedical research on the brain and nervous system.
Brain scans of combat-exposed Vietnam War veterans showed that certain serious head injuries to certain parts of the brain can prevent soldiers from developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The findings, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Naval Medical Centre, suggested that drugs or pacemaker-like devices aimed at dampening activity in these brain regions might be effective treatments for PTSD.
Jordan Grafman, Ph.D., a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of NIH, turned to the Vietnam Head Injury Study (VHIS) to make that distinction. The VHIS is a registry of Vietnam veterans who sustained penetrating brain injuries (which are less common in Iraq compared to concussion brain injuries). It has received support from the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans of Affairs and NIH, and is currently supported by NINDS.
"If we could show that lesions in a specific brain region eliminated PTSD, we knew we could say that the region is critical to developing the disorder," said Dr. Grafman. The results of his study appear online today in "Nature Neuroscience".
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