Study: Functional MRI sheds light on post-traumatic stress for pediatric patients

Post-traumatic stress symptoms may present a neurofunctional marker of decreased activity of the hippocampus in youth with a history of interpersonal trauma, said a new study's lead author Victor Carrion, MD, child psychiatrist and associate professor of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University in Calif., and his colleagues.

According to a recent study published in the December edition of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, youths who have experienced post-traumatic stress symptoms or interpersonal trauma experience cognitive development deficits. The goal of the study was to test the function of the hippocampus-- the part of the brain which plays a role in long-term and retrieval of a memory--by way of a verbal memory test taking place during a functional MRI scan.

Twenty-seven adolescents between the ages of 10-17 years were recruited for the study. Of the 27, 16 adolescents presented with post-traumatic stress symptoms and 11 psychologically healthy adolescents were used as a control group. Both groups underwent functional MRI scans and a Verbal Declarative Memory Task at the same time.

The memory task asked the adolescents to read a list of words and then read a similar list that included additional words. The test then asked the participants to determine which words were present on the original list.

In both the control and the post-traumatic stress symptoms group, the hippocampus functioned equally well when the original word list was first presented to the participants.  When the second list was presented and the researchers asked the adolescents to recall words, however, the post-traumatic stress symptoms group showed more errors and presented less hippocampus activity, said the authors.

Moreover, according to the authors, adolescents that showed the lowest function of hippocampus activity are more likely to present with post-traumatic stress symptoms--including avoidance, numbing and difficulty in remembering a trauma.

Carrion and colleagues hope that this research may help explain the behavior of traumatized youths and possibly improve current post-traumatic stress disorder treatments.

“It's already clear that untreated post-traumatic stress disorder can interfere with a child's normal brain development and increase the risk of other psychiatric conditions such as depression and substance abuse," Carrion concluded.”Early intervention is critical for children with posttraumatic stress.”

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