Posttraumatic stress disorder
hidePosttraumatic stress disorder (abbreviated PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.
It is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma. This stressor may involve someone's actual death, a threat to the patient's or someone else's life, serious physical injury, an unwanted sexual act, or a threat to physical or psychological integrity, overwhelming psychological defenses.
In some cases it can also be from profound psychological and emotional trauma, apart from any actual physical harm. Often, however, incidents involving both things are found to be the cause.
PTSD is a more chronic and less frequent consequence of trauma than the normal acute stress response.
PTSD has also been recognized in the past as railway spine, stress syndrome, shell shock, battle fatigue, traumatic war neurosis, or post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Diagnostic symptoms include reexperience, such as flashbacks and nightmares; avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma; and increased arousal, such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger, and hypervigilance. Per definition, the symptoms last more than six months and cause significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (e.g. problems with work and relationships).
For more information about Posttraumatic stress disorder, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
News tagged with post traumatic stress disorder
Use of cannabinoids could help post-traumatic stress disorder patients
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Nov 04, 2009 |
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Use of cannabinoids (marijuana) could assist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder patients. This is exposed in a recent study carried out at the Learning and Memory Lab in the University of Haifa's Department ...
Military experiment seeks to predict PTSD
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Nov 20, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Two days before shipping off to war, Marine Pfc. Jesse Sheets sat inside a trailer in the Mojave Desert, his gaze fixed on a computer that flashed a rhythmic pulse of contrasting images.
Birds in captivity lose hippocampal mass
Oct 12, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Being in captivity for just a few weeks can reduce the volume of the hippocampus by as much as 23 percent, according to a new Cornell study.
Researchers unravel mystery behind long-lasting memories
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Aug 11, 2009 |
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A new study by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine may reveal how long-lasting memories form in the brain.
'American Diet' v. Atkins Diet
Oct 19, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- If people can learn anything from rats, what to eat might be one of the most useful lessons. University of South Florida Professor David Diamond, in the Departments of Psychology, Molecular ...
New study sheds light on brain's response to distress, unexpected events (w/ Video)
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Nov 10, 2009 |
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In a new study, psychologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) are able to see in detail for the first time how various regions of the human brain respond when people experience an unexpected or traumatic ...
Scanning invisible damage of PTSD, brain blasts
Nov 09, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Powerful scans are letting doctors watch just how the brain changes in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and concussion-like brain injuries - signature damage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Psychiatric impact of torture could be amplified by head injury
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Nov 06, 2009 |
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Depression and other emotional symptoms in survivors of torture and other traumatic experiences may be exacerbated by the effects of head injuries, according to a study from the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma (HPRT), based ...
Gene Increases Susceptibility to Post-Traumatic Stress, Researchers Find
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Nov 02, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A gene variant makes people who experienced trauma as children or adults more susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Yale researchers have found.
Researchers use computational models to study fear
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Sep 30, 2009 |
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The brain is a complex system made of billions of neurons and thousands of connections that relate to every human feeling, including one of the strongest emotions, fear. Most neurological fear studies have been rooted in ...
Finding fear: Neuroscientists locate where it is stored in the brain
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Jul 07, 2009 |
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Fear is a powerful emotion and neuroscientists have for the first time located the neurons responsible for fear conditioning in the mammalian brain. Fear conditioning is a form of Pavlovian, or associative, ...
Coming undone: How stress unravels the brain's structure
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Mar 04, 2009 |
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The helpless behavior that is commonly linked to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is preceded by stress-related losses of synapses—microscopic connections between brain cells—in the brain's hippocampal ...
Forget it! A biochemical pathway for blocking your worst fears?
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Mar 24, 2009 |
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A receptor for glutamate, the most prominent neurotransmitter in the brain, plays a key role in the process of "unlearning," report researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Their findings, published in the ...
Two brain structures key to emotional balance especially in threatening situations
Medicine & Health / Neuroscience
Oct 21, 2009 |
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Researchers have discovered that a primitive region of the brain responsible for sensorimotor control also has an important role in regulating emotional responses to threatening situations. This region appears to work in ...
No Direct Link Between Panic Attacks, PTSD
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Apr 09, 2009 |
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New Geisinger-lead research dispels a recent notion in psychiatry that if a person experiences a panic attack during a traumatic event that they will likely suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the future.
