Ptsd

Women deployed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are emerging as a group especially vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder, researchers reported this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn. More than 230,000 women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, according to a Los Angeles Times story published in April on PTSD among female military personnel. Women, however, have been denied insurance coverage for treatment for PTSD at a higher rate than men because of a former stipulation that required combat experience to qualify for the benefit.

Survivors who escaped the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder years after the event, a study finds. Researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health surveyed 3,271 survivors two to three years after surviving the attack. About 95% said they had at least one recent post-traumatic stress symptom, and after screening, 15% were positive for PTSD. Only 4.4% reported no symptoms. Several risk factors for PTSD included which tower and floor people were on when the attacks occurred; when they were able to evacuate; exposure to the post-collapse dust cloud; witnessing some horrific scene (seeing a plane hit the towers, witnessing people falling or jumping from the towers)

Just before noon on a December morning in 1988, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook over 40% of the territory of Armenia, centered in the northern city of Spitak. The temblor leveled entire towns and cities, killed an estimated 25,000 Armenians - two-thirds of them children trapped and crushed in their crumbling schools - and hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of which Armenia was then a part. But the Spitak disaster was more than a geopolitical milestone. The earthquake was, in the words of one researcher, a "psychiatric calamity" that has yielded a trove of knowledge aboutpost-traumatic stress disorder.

Eighteen months after they have returned from a war zone, soldiers bear an unmistakable sign of emotional trauma deep inside their brains. But in most, a key node of the brain's fear circuitry returns to normal, perhaps keeping mental illness such as post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ) from developing, says a new study published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. The study, a follow-up to an earlier brain-imaging study conducted by Dutch researchers, put two groups of Dutch soldiers into a brain scanner called a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, and had them look at pictures of people expressing anger or fear.

Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have an increased risk of mental health disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder . Now a new study finds these individuals are also more likely to receive opioid pain prescriptions and to misuse those drugs. The study , published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., creates a picture of escalating problems for veterans who come back from war with emotional and physical problems. The study examined 141,029 veterans of the recent wars after their return home.

Re "Revulsion to War Isn't a Mental Disorder," Commentary, July 8: As a Vietnam combat veteran with a 70% service-connected disability (post-traumatic stress disorder), I agree with much of what Richard J. McNally says. True, a questionnaire given to troops three to four months out of combat is not a valid source of PTSD diagnosis confirmation. It is, however, a valuable beginning indicator for any agency that is willing to undertake a timeline study of these troops to determine how and if they'll be sweeping their nightmares, flashbacks, disturbing thoughts and the many other PTSD symptoms under their individual psychological rugs.

SAN DIEGO - Todd Vance - Iraq combat veteran, bar bouncer, and social-work major at a local university - is lecturing two dozen of his fellow veterans on the techniques and joys of the chokehold. "You want the blade of your forearm on their windpipe or carotid artery," Vance says in a commanding voice. "Push your opponent into the fence.…Let's have some fun with this drill!" It's Saturday morning in North Park, and the veterans have come to a steamy, noisy gym for Vance's mixed martial arts class.

For veterans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with head injuries, the wounds of war may eventually include dementia. In a study reported at a July 18 meeting in Paris of the Alzheimer's Assn. , researchers found that older veterans who had suffered concussions were more than twice as likely as other veterans to develop Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. Doctors have suspected for many years that a blow to the head could set the stage for dementia. But the new study - involving more than 281,000 veterans 55 and over - was one of the largest to ever look at the long-term effects on a group that suffers more than its share of head injuries.

Women exposed to disturbing news stories absorb an emotional blow greater than do men--so much greater that when next exposed to a stressful situation, their stress levels soar, according to a new study. And the women remember the bad news longer. Those findings emerged from the small but intriguing study published this week  in the open-access journal Public Library of Science (PLoS One), and conducted on 60 participants at Montreal's Center for Studies on Human Stress. Thirty men and 30 women were brought into the lab and asked to read a sheaf of newspaper articles.

According to conventional wisdom, America didn't acknowledge the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder until the Vietnam War. But that isn't really quite true. Long before 1978's "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" premiered, the nation was aware of what war could do to a person: Ulysses, Macbeth, the poet Wilfred Owen, J.D. Salinger's sleepless narrator in "For Esmé ? With Love and Squalor" all suffered psychologically from exposure to battle. (More recently, Pat Barker's award-winning "Regeneration" trilogy revolved around the treatment of shell-shock victims after World War I.)