PTSD tagged posts

How Stress Changes our Memories: Engrams and the Endocannabinoid system may inform new PTSD treatments

memory
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered that stress changes how our brain encodes and retrieves aversive memories, and discovered a promising new way to restore appropriate memory specificity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If you stumble during a presentation, you might feel stressed the next time you have to present because your brain associates your next presentation with that one poor and aversive experience. This type of stress is tied to one memory.

But stress from traumatic events like violence or generalized anxiety disorder can spread far beyond the original event, known as stress-induced aversive memory generalization, where fireworks or car backfires can trigger seemingly unrelated ...

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Neurobiologists Uncover how Stress turns into Fear in the Brain in Conditions such as PTSD

Our nervous systems are naturally wired to sense fear. Whether prompted by the eerie noises we hear alone in the dark or the approaching growl of a threatening animal, our fear response is a survival mechanism that tells us to remain alert and avoid dangerous situations.Read More

Brain Imaging predicts PTSD after brain injury

This shows the outline of a brain in a woman's head
Together, the findings suggest that a “brain reserve,” or higher cortical volumes, may provide some resilience against PTSD. Image is in the public domain

Brain volume measurement may provide early biomarker. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma. How its symptoms, including anxiety, depression and cognitive disturbances arise remains incompletely understood and unpredictable. Treatments and outcomes could potentially be improved if doctors could better predict who would develop PTSD. Now, researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have found potential brain biomarkers of PTSD in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

The study appears in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience a...

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How to Enhance or Suppress Memories

This is what a bad memory looks like in a mouse brain. The cells glowing green indicate that they are being activated in storing a fear memory. Credit: The Ramirez Group, Boston University

Stimulating different parts of the brain can dial up or down a specific memory’s emotional oomph, study shows. What if scientists could manipulate your brain so that a traumatic memory lost its emotional power over your psyche? Steve Ramirez, a Boston University neuroscientist fascinated by memory, believes that a small structure in the brain could hold the keys to future therapeutic techniques for treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD, someday allowing clinicians to enhance positive memories or suppress negative ones.

Inside our brains, a cashew-shaped structure called the hippocampus stores t...

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