A follow-up on yesterday's post on brain changes in PTSD....
A study has found that PTSD patients with a larger hippocampus--a region of the brain key to distinguishing between safety and threat--are more likely to respond to exposure-based therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The study, from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), was published online in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging on May 4, 2016.
Previous research has shown that having a smaller hippocampus is associated with increased risk of PTSD. In this study, the researchers examined the relationship between hippocampus volume, measured with MRI, and response to treatment in 50 participants with PTSD and 36 trauma-exposed healthy controls. The participants were evaluated at baseline and after 10 weeks, during which time the PTSD group had prolonged exposure therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that has been shown to help patients with PTSD discriminate between real and imagined trauma.
The study found that patients with PTSD who responded to treatment had greater hippocampal volume at the beginning of the study than non-responders to treatment.
The findings add to growing evidence that the hippocampus is key to distinguishing between cues that signal safety and those that signal threat.