Abstract
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a highly disabling condition, increasingly recognized as both a disorder of mental health and social burden, but also as an anxiety disorder characterized by fear, stress, and negative alterations in mood. PTSD is associated with structural, metabolic, and molecular changes in several brain regions and the neural circuitry. Brain areas implicated in the traumatic stress response include the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex, which play an essential role in memory function. Abnormalities in these brain areas are hypothesized to underlie symptoms of PTSD and other stress-related psychiatric disorders. Conventional methods of studying PTSD have proven to be insufficient for diagnosis, measurement of treatment efficacy, and monitoring disease progression, and currently, there is no diagnostic biomarker available for PTSD. A deep understanding of cutting-edge neuroimaging genetic approaches is necessary for the development of novel therapeutics and biomarkers to better diagnose and treat the disorder. A current goal is to understand the gene pathways that are associated with PTSD, and how those genes act on the fear/stress circuitry to mediate risk vs. resilience for PTSD. This review article explains the rationale and practical utility of neuroimaging genetics in PTSD and how the resulting information can aid the diagnosis and clinical management of patients with PTSD.
Highlights
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychological illness that can arise after a person experiences one or more traumatic events such as military combat, physical trauma due to injury, or other accidents such as domestic violence, rape, childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse
One study using Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) reported that white matter regions in the areas of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), angular and precentral gyrus, and prefrontal cortex (PFC) of subjects with PTSD showed lower fractional anisotropy (FA) [28]
An fMRI study using a 3-back and identity task was conducted in women with PTSD who had been abused sexually; this study showed more significant deactivation of the posterior mid-parietal regions and greater activation of the left frontal regions than in healthy controls [42]
Summary
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychological illness that can arise after a person experiences one or more traumatic events such as military combat, physical trauma due to injury, or other accidents such as domestic violence, rape, childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse. The presence of has been associated with a range of neuroimaging abnormalities, and people with PTSD show subtle differences, on average, in the neuroimaging abnormalities, and people with show subtle differences, on average, in the architecture of common genetic variants or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the genome. Analysis gene expression, copy and related psychiatric disorders, many new developments include analysis of gene expression, copy number variants, and sequencing of the whole genome. 2. Neuroimaging in PTSD provides a whole-brain analysis of specific brain structures, including data on the cortical and MRI has been used to diagnose many neurological disorders anddiagnostic to investigate standardon features subcortical structure volumes in patients who have PTSD. MRI systems involved in emotional processing, responsible for problems with memory and attention, provides a whole-brain analysis of specific brain structures, including the cortical subcortical is provided by both task-based and resting-state fMRI. Neuroimaging-genetics studies brain, offering measures thatTable can help in detecting the early onsetinofPTSD
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