From: Israel MFA Online [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2012 05:36
To: [concealed] Weiss Meir
Subject: Tracking trauma in the brain 13 December 2012


 MFA Newsletter

Tracking trauma in the brain 
Locating areas of the brain vulnerable to the effects of stress can lead to
better outcomes for post-traumatic stress disorder, say Israeli researchers.

(By Rivka Borochov)

Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University 
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a huge risk for first responders
like emergency medical technicians, police officers and firefighters. They
deal with horrific scenes of disaster that most of us only watch in
Hollywood movies. 
Though PTSD is a poorly understood condition with no methodologies for
long-term care, help is on the way from Israel for better prediction of
susceptibility -- and therefore better treatment for each individual.
Professors Talma Hendler and Nathan Intrator from Tel Aviv University are
working on groundbreaking tools that pair a commonplace
electroencephalography (EEG) and a more complex functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) to track PTSD deep in the brain. Their approach is
to locate the traces of PTSD in the brain and monitor those areas over time
to determine “stress vulnerability” in each patient.
“The unique thing about our research is that we are looking at individuals
over time -- not just when they have the disease -- in order to see the
vulnerability measurements for PTSD,” says Hendler. “We were able to predict
developing symptoms after a year and a half.”
The two professors and other researchers worked with a test group of Israeli
military medics through the Functional Brain Center of the Wohl Institute
for Advanced Imaging at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. The subjects were
examined before they entered their mandatory military service and after
their subsequent exposure to stressful events while deployed in combat
units.
Hendler says this group represented a rare opportunity for studying PTSD:
Unlike most other combat medics around the world, Israeli medics are on
active duty; they comprise a slice of the general population; and due to the
small size of the country, the researchers were able to easily access the
soldiers over time to monitor their condition.
Finding the potential to heal
Hendler says another unique aspect of the study was identifying areas of
“plasticity,” or places in the brain that were able to bounce back from PTSD
injury.
“We saw events like these which are changing the brain, and this is
happening in the brain areas of memory and learning like in the
hippocampus,” says Hendler. “These regions are changing over time, which
suggests that this might be a good target for treatment if you catch it at
the right time.” 
The symptoms of PTSD manifest differently in different people, and can range
from anxiety and depression to suicidal tendencies. Medical practitioners
around 
the world are looking for better ways to diagnose and manage the poorly
understood but widely experienced disorder.
The Israeli approach has been documented in journals such as Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and Cerebral Cortex.
Partnering with MIT
Using EEG to record electrical impulses in the brain and fMRI to study
oxygenated blood in the brain, the researchers subjected the test
participants to stress stimuli. Advanced algorithms were then built to
identify brain activity associated with certain emotional experiences, and
these emotions were linked to cognitive areas in the brain. 
In the future, the algorithms they devised can be applied on EEG readouts to
gain a better understanding of brain pathology, without the use of the more
expensive and less readily available fMRI. This powerful tool, the
researchers hope, will eventually give doctors an easier way of customizing
treatment for patients with PTSD before significant psychopathological
effects have taken place.
Work toward bringing the Israeli PTSD research to medical communities
everywhere is now underway at Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
 


13 December 2012
 
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