Research Hit: New Research Shows Who Can Develop PTSD

Important new research seems to show the counter-intuitive conditions, and who is at risk, of being traumatised

Isn’t PTSD directly linked to Trauma incidents?

Well, obviously, yes. It requires a trauma incident, but the obvious point is that in these potential trauma inducing incidents some people develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and others don’t. It would be extremely useful to know who is more at risk of this.

Right, and have these researchers then been able to find out what will predict who will and who won’t develop PTSD?

In short, yes. With lots of caveats. The most obvious is that this is research into rats - but this gives extremely useful insights into the processes and correlations of PTSD.

Sorry, a bit of an obvious questions can we give rats PTSD?

Well, the researchers, around Silvia Monari of the EPFL in Switzerland, put them into schock scenarios and conditioned this shock (by repeating it), then followed their responses and sleep patterns afterwards, also measuring hormonal responses and fearful behaviours, followed by a so-called extinction training. This extinction training tries to reduce the conditioned negative response - so tracking how long the conditioned response takes to reduce or disappear.

So, it’s not quite like what human beings have as PTSD but there are lots of similarities. And particularly, importantly, a type of rat was much more likely to exhibit PTSD symptoms with disturbed sleep, high stress behaviours, and low extinction.

Now I’m really interested - what was the distinction?