Last night (it was 3/10/2008) I read an article for psychiatry rotation: Cognitive abnormalities in post-traumatic stress disorder. As i usually do, i approached their claims with doubt.
To summaries, the article made the following main points.
-In PTSD patients, memories of a trauma can be represented in different ways. PTSD patients may have either have thoughs ABOUT the trauma or thoughts OF the trauma itself.
ABOUT: … why did this happen to me? [is verbally accessible]
OF: … actual images or flashbacks. (visual types are most common) [is situationally accessible]
-Trauma patients have disorganization when asked to recall traumatic memories. In fact, the more severe the trauma, the more likely it is that the patient will have amnesia for the traumatic event.
Clinical relevance: we can use this in somethign called Emotional Stroop studies. Trauma-exposed individuals will take longer when asked to name colors related to their trauma when compared with patients that have not been exposed to trauma. This can allow us to distinguish true PTSD patient from those “faking it” in order to get government compensation.
-Stroop effect can be explained by amygdala hyperactivity or medial prefrontal cortex hypoactivitiy. The MPC repressess the amygdala (which is involved in mediating fear).
-High IQ is protective against PTSD. The article even suggested that this is pirmarily genetically determined… which i had high doubts against. They did studies using twins and showed that people with high IQ that were exposed to trauma did not have PTSD while patients with lower IQ did have PTSD (the twin siblings of both were not exposed to trauma were fine).
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The following day (3/11/2008), I went to the psychiatry journal club at the VA and this article was presented by one of the 2 neuropsychiatry fellows. He basically mentioned the few points that I summarized here. I like how he further explained the stroop test. His view about the genetics was also similar to mine (he explained it as being cross-sectional study and the fact that we don’t really know whether IQ or Amydala sizes just correlate to or actually help cause PTSD).