Smaller Global and Regional Cortical Volume in Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract

Cerebral cortical volume, thickness, and area may be smaller in adult chronic severe PTSD; however, the extracted structural variables did not mediate relations between intelligence and PTSD. The 4 regions exhibiting especially smaller cortical volumes in this sample share involvement in mechanisms subserving "top-down" facilitation of the identification of objects and words. Compromise of these regions may result in difficulty in relearning pretrauma schemata for interpreting the civilian physical and social environments.

Neuronal correlates of the five factor model (FFM) of human personality: Multimodal imaging in a large healthy sample

“…Reductions in surface area (Woodward et al, 2009), and thickness (Geuze et al, 2008;Hunter et al, 2011) of the superior temporal cortex, volume reductions of anterior cingulate cortex (Corbo et al, 2005;Karl et al, 2006;Kasai et al, 2008;Yamasue et al, 2003), and prefrontal reductions in volume (De Bellis et al, 2002;Woodward et al, 2009) and thickness (Geuze et al, 2008), have been reported in PTSD. It is known that only a minority of trauma victims develop PTSD, and that neuroticism is related to risk of developing PTSD (Cox et al, 2004).…”

“…It is widely held that stress could be deleterious for brain morphology. Previous imaging studies have shown that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with altered brain development (De Bellis et al, 1999) and reductions in GM and WM volumes (Bremner et al, 1995;Carrion et al, 2001;De Bellis et al, 2002;Wignall et al, 2004;Woodward et al, 2009;Yamasue et al, 2003). In animal models chronic and acute stress causes dendritic retraction of hippocampal (McEwen, 1999;McKittrick et al, 2000) and prefrontal cortices (Brown et al, 2005;Izquierdo et al, 2006;Radley et al, 2004Radley et al, , 2006, reduces neurogenesis (Gould et al, 1997(Gould et al, , 1998, and alters neurochemistry (Anisman and Zacharko, 1986) and neuron excitability (Jedema and Grace, 2003).…”

Similar cortical but not subcortical gray matter abnormalities in women with posttraumatic stress disorder with versus without dissociative identity disorder

“…Whereas some predominantly respond with hyperarousal and others with hypoarousal, still others alternate between the two (Van der Hart et al, 2006;Lanius et al, 2010). Although several imaging studies have investigated the neuroanatomical correlates of PTSD (Bremner et al, 2003;Geuze et al, 2008;Kasai et al, 2008;Woodward et al, 2009), the neuroanatomical correlates of dissociative symptoms in relation to lifetime potentially traumatizing events remain unclear.…”

“…To our knowledge, no neuroimaging study has yet assessed whole-brain morphology in DID. The neuroanatomical correlates of PTSD mainly point to smaller GM volume of the hippocampal formation and insula, frontal (including anterior cingulate, medial and lateral prefrontal, orbitofrontal, superior, middle and inferior frontal) cortices and temporal (including superior temporal and parahippocampal) cortices (Bremner et al, 2003;Geuze et al, 2008;Kasai et al, 2008;Weniger et al, 2008;Woodward et al, 2009;Nardo et al, 2010Nardo et al, , 2013Kuo et al, 2012). Furthermore, previous literature investigating the relationships between brain morphology and severity of lifetime traumatizing events, dissociative and depersonalization/derealization symptoms in both DID and PTSD patients have reported mixed findings (Stein et al, 1997;Bremner et al, 2003;Ehling et al, 2008;Nardo et al, 2010Nardo et al, , 2013.…”

“…We hypothesized that (1) patients with DID and co-morbid PTSD and patients with PTSD only would show GM reductions compared to controls, in the frontal cortices (including anterior cingulate, medial and lateral prefrontal, orbitofrontal, superior, middle and inferior frontal) (Geuze et al, 2008;Woodward et al, 2009;Nardo et al, 2013) and insular cortex (Kasai et al, 2008) as well as in the hippocampus and amygdala (Vermetten et al, 2006;Ehling et al, 2008); (2) Differences in GM abnormalities between the two patient groups were expected in the inferior parietal cortex (Simeon et al, 2000;Reinders et al, 2003Reinders et al, , 2006Reinders et al, , 2012Reinders et al, , 2014 and the dorsal striatum . Finally, (3) we expected that volume of the GM regions sensitive to the effects of stress, such as the hippocampus, would show negative correlations with severity of the lifetime traumatizing events.…”