A Promising Breakthrough In Treating PTSD

By Richard Hernandez

Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mentally deteriorating illness in which the victim suffers from flashbacks, nightmares, seizures and distress after experiencing/witnessing a traumatic event. PTSD is prevalent in about 8 million people every year and about 1 in every 13 people will develop PTSD in their lifetime. Like many other mental illnesses there is no current cure for PTSD and only medication and psychotherapy exist to manage the symptoms of PTSD. Until recently, psychotherapy and medication has been ineffective for those with chronic, treatment-resistant symptoms. Neuroscientists Kelly Bijanki and Jon Willie have uncovered a way to finally treat these patients.

Some individuals with treatment-resistant symptoms have seizures that arise in the hippocampus and amygdala, making medication and psychotherapy virtually impossible to be used effectively. Keeping this in mind, Bijanki and Willie decided to test neurosurgical laser ablation on victims experiencing treatment-resistant symptoms for over a decade. The first patient was a 62-year-old male veteran who was diagnosed with treatment resistant PTSD after a blast injury in the Vietnam War. After the procedure the veteran showed decreases in his re-experiencing the event, avoidance behavior, and improvement in depressive symptoms and anxiety. The second patient was a 42-year-old female with a 19 year history of treatment-resistant symptoms. After her surgery she showed remarkable decrease in hyperarousal and dramatic improvement in her cognition and mood.

Though the procedure produced promising results, there are evident downsides to this treatment and therefore it is not ready for clinical use yet. For one, laser ablation on the brain is an irreversible process that destroys specific portions of the brain which can lead to cognitive changes. Also, the success rate for this laser ablation process is only 75% which means the procedure is very risky. However, when weighing the benefits and the risks, the benefits greatly outweigh the risk because seizures can be disabling and cause cognitive change on its own.

This procedure is currently the only one that can treat the drug-resistant symptoms that arise in the brain tissue. The risk of changing cognitive function is an inevitable risk that some victims will have to take when receiving this treatment. Continuous research is being done in order to find a less invasive way to treat the drug-resistant brain tissue. Researchers are working to create a surface-applied electric stimulation technique that can target specific areas of the brain. This technique will produce the same results of laser ablation.

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1 A neural center in the limbic system associated with memories of facts/events

2 Two neural clusters in the limbic system, linked to emotion

3 A treatment to remove tumors and lesions. It uses light (lasers) to heat and destroy unwanted cells.