A new study led by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, suggests that using neurostimulation therapies on a specific brain network could treat post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in veterans. By evaluating 193 participants in the Vietnam Head Injury Study with penetrating traumatic brain injury, the team found those with damage connected to their amygdala, the fear center of the brain, were less likely to develop PTSD. Their results are published in Nature Neuroscience.
This is a very real brain disease, and we can localize it to certain brain circuits. Unfortunately, people sometimes assume PTSD has to do with how mentally strong or weak a person is, but it has nothing to do with moral character." Shan Siddiqi, MD, corresponding author, psychiatrist in the Brigham's Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics and assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School Siddiqi collaborated with other researchers from the Brigham's Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, as well as investigators from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Brown University Alpert School of Medicine, and Duke University School of Medicine.
He said previous studies have shown people with damage to the amygdala are less likely to get PTSD, but the team wanted to find a therapeutic target for the disease. "The amygdala is deep in the brain, making it hard to hit precisely with a stimulation modality without.