Word: ptsd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2010-2019
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...attention focused on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in recent years, doctors have never had a clear-cut way to be certain a patient has it. But Minnesota scientists now believe they have found a long-sought PTSD fingerprint that confirms the disorder by measuring electromagnetic fields in the brain. The finding, detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering, could help the 300,000 cases of PTSD that are anticipated among the 2 million U.S. troops who have gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq...
...This shows that PTSD is a brain disease," says Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, who led the research along with Brian Engdahl and a team from the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center and University of Minnesota. "There have been questions that this is a made-up disorder and isn't a true brain disease, but it is." Just as importantly, he says, the magnetic-imaging biomarker shows changes over time in a brain's electrical activity, allowing mental-health workers to chart the effectiveness of various therapies. "It will be a tremendous tool in monitoring treatment," he says...
...until now, more conventional diagnostic tools, including computed tomography, magnetic-resonance imaging and X-rays have not been able to detect evidence of PTSD because their snapshots of brain activity occur too slowly. The new diagnostic procedure uses magnetoencephalography (MEG), a way of monitoring the flow of electrical signals along the brain's neural pathways from cell to cell. By using a helmet with 248 noninvasive sensors arrayed around the head, scientists can map patterns of electrical activity inside the skull and detect abnormalities. The Minnesota researchers used MEG to assess 74 U.S. veterans believed to be suffering from PTSD...
...literally exporting its mental illnesses. "In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad," writes journalist Ethan Watters. He traces how conditions first widely diagnosed in the U.S., such as anorexia and PTSD, have spread abroad "with the speed of contagious diseases." The growth of Big Pharma and the widespread adoption of U.S. health standards have made the ailing American psyche the primary diagnostic model. By 2008, for example, GlaxoSmithKline was selling over $1 billion worth of Paxil a year to the Japanese...