Attention and regional cerebral blood flow in posttraumatic stress disorder patients with substance abuse histories

Functional neuroimaging studies in posttraumatic stress disorder: review of current methods and findings

“…Conversely, another study reported parallel hypoactivation of these structures in a group of combat veterans with PTSD [Liberzon et al, 2003]. Other PTSD studies report no changes in amygdalar [Bremner et al, 1999a,b;Britton et al, 2005;Lanius et al, 2001Lanius et al, , 2002Lanius et al, , 2003bYang et al, 2004] or mPFC [Bonne et al, 2005;Semple et al, 1996] activity. One possible explanation for the lack of amygdalar activation in two of these studies [Britton et al, 2005;Lanius et al, 2001] is the use of traumatic scripts (internally generated stimuli as opposed to externally generated sounds or images).…”

“…One possibility for the lack of results in the study by Rauch et al [2000] could be the presentation of masked emotional faces, a practice not employed by studies showing reduced mPFC activity. Semple et al [1996] also failed to find a difference in mPFC activity, yet they did manage to do so in a more recent study using a similar auditory continuous performance task paradigm. Finally, Lanius et al [2002] found an increase in mPFC/ACC region, as opposed to the decreased activation trend.…”

“…These tasks are usually designed so that they change neural activities in regions hypothesized to be dysfunctional in PTSD. Such tasks include emotional recall tasks [Pavic et al, 2003], memory recall tasks [Shin et al, 2004b], memory encoding tasks [Bremner et al, 2003b], the counting Stroop task [Shin et al, 2001], the emotional Stroop task [Bremner et al, 2004], and the auditory continuous performance task [ACPT; Semple et al, 1993Semple et al, , 1996Semple et al, , 2000. Each of these methods measure variables of how well a subject performs a task and what actual neural activity is involved during these tasks.…”

Neuropsychological Sequelae of PTSD and TBI Following War Deployment among OEF/OIF Veterans

“…These findings are representative of other studies with war Veterans in which PTSD was associated with deficits on encoding (e.g., Gurvits, Lasko, Schacter, Kuhne, Orr, & Pitman, 1993;Uddo, Vasterling, Brailey, & Sutker, 1993;Barrett, Green, Morris, Giles, & Croft, 1996;Vasterling, Brailey, Constans, Borges, & Sutker, 1997;Beckham, Crawford, & Feldman, 1998;Gilbertson et al, 2001), but not set-shifting (Gurvits et al, 1993;Sullivan, Krengel, Proctor, Devine, Heeren, & White, 2003) or focus-execute tasks (Litz et al, 1996). Findings regarding sustained attention have been mixed, with studies finding PTSD-related deficits in Veterans (Semple et al, 1996) and civilians (e.g., McFarlane, Weber, & Clark, 1993) while other studies of Veterans found no relation (Sullivan et al, 2003;Vasterling et al, 2000). These mixed findings may be related to differences across sustained attention tasks.…”

Neural correlates of exposure to traumatic pictures and sound in Vietnam combat veterans with and without posttraumatic stress disorder: a positron emission tomography study

“…Reduced volume of the hippocampus measured with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was found in several populations of PTSD patients, possibly secondary to stress-induced atrophy (Bremner et al 1995b(Bremner et al , 1997bGurvits et al 1996;Stein et al 1997). Decreased metabolism measured with positron emission tomography (PET) was found at baseline in temporal and prefrontal cortex in combat-related PTSD (Bremner et al 1997a) and in parietal cortex in patients with PTSD and comorbid substance dependence (Semple et al 1996).…”