Potential discovery of biological markers for PTSD
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is common in veterans and those who work and live in conflict zones, but just what causes one person to develop PTSD after trauma and not another is still unknown. Scientists from the US may now have discovered a biological marker that can tell whether a person is at risk of developing PTSD.
Source: PM | Duration: 4min 9sec
MARK COLVIN: Scientists from the US may have discovered a biological marker that can tell whether a person is at risk of developing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on a large scale study of rats.
Rachel Carbonell reports.
RACHEL CARBONELL: Seventy per cent of people will experience a serious traumatic event in their lives, and of those, 15 per cent will develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's common in veterans and people who work and live in conflict zones but can be triggered by any highly stressful event in a person's life.
Just what causes one person to develop PTSD after trauma and another not to, is still unknown. But scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York say they've identified a biological marker for the condition in rats.
Melbourne University Professor of psychiatry Malcolm Hopwood says the findings are a potential step towards preventing PTSD.
MALCOLM HOPWOOD: If this turned out to be a real biological marker in humans, it would help us predict amongst a whole group of people exposed to stress who is likely to develop PTSD. We've wanted for a long time to develop interventions that we can use soon after stress to prevent people from developing PTSD, but our current problem is if we give them to everyone who's exposed we might be treating a lot of people who don't need it.
RACHEL CARBONELL: Scientists in this field say some studies have shown encouraging preliminary results when people exposed to stress have been treated with increased doses of cortisol - the human bodies stress hormone. But those results aren't conclusive and cortisol can have significant negative side-effects and thus needs to be used cautiously.
The US study exposed rats to stressful situations and identified which ones developed signs of PTSD and which didn't.
Researchers were able to identify differences in the stress hormone receptors in those two groups. Professor Hopwood says the next step is finding out if that marker correlates in humans.
MALCOLM HOPWOOD: There are some challenges in doing those studies so quite rightly in the first few days after a life threatening stress, people's ability to consent to participate in biological research may be impaired and then they just need to be treated with respect.
RACHEL CARBONELL: One of Australia's leading experts in this field, Kim Felmingham, from the University of Tasmania says these latest findings add to the existing research on PTSD risk factors.
KIM FELMINGHAM: When you've got something like PTSD there's multi variant factors, we've got to look at what are the risk factors. We know there's some genetic involvement, we know that if you've got a pre-morbid history of psychological disturbance like depression or anxiety or previous trauma, you're more at risk. So we're looking now to see, let's look at this combination of factors but add in these biomarkers.
The exciting thing about the biomarkers is that that actually gives us the opportunity to potentially modulate the risk, whereas we can't obviously change someone's genetics, we can't undo their trauma history but we can potentially alter their bio-states which may actually facilitate reducing that risk.
RACHEL CARBONELL: Professor Felmingham says using drugs to reduce the likelihood of getting PTSD after a traumatic event is still a way off, but if drugs can be developed on a the basis of biological markers, it would be a very worthwhile outcome.
KIM FELMINGHAM: The treatment we have for PTSD when people have developed it is relatively effective, which is our cognitive behavioural therapy, but there's always a hunt to improve treatment.
Where the field has really emphasised things is to try and find preventative, the development of PTSD. So the idea is can you do something and they're looking a pharmacological type of agents, can we manipulate cortisol levels in the first sort of acute aftermath after trauma, and if we do can we then prevent the development of PTSD, which has obviously got very important public health implications.
MARK COLVIN: Professor Kim Felmingham from the University of Tasmania ending Rachel Carbonell's report.