Researchers have found a biomarker that might help understand why certain people develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PSTD.
People with PTSD suffer from flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety. Researchers say that not every person who experiences trauma suffers from PTSD. Hence, they wanted to find out why some people were more susceptible to the stress disorder than others and undertook a study to find the biomarkers that could better measure each person's vulnerability to the disorder.
Their study conducted on rats found that blood expression levels of genes targeted by the stress hormones, the glucocorticoids, might be an indication of risk of PTSD.
Researchers also stated that the steroid hormones' receptor, the glucocorticoid, can be targeted by new drugs.
"Our aim was to determine which genes are differentially expressed in relation to PTSD," lead researcher Rachel Yehuda, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in the press release.
"We found that most of the genes and pathways that are different in PTSD-like animals compared to resilient animals are related to the glucocorticoid receptor, which suggests we might have identified a therapeutic target for treatment of PTSD," added Dr. Yehuda, who also heads the Mental Health Patient Care Center and PTSD Research Program at the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx.
People suffering from PTSD also face other health problem. A recent research showed PTSD patients experiencing poor sleep quality have reduced physical activity.
The current study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
