Study Points at a Clear-Cut Way to Diagnose PTSD
Study Points at a Clear-Cut Way to Diagnose PTSD
For all the attention focused on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in recent years, doctors have never had a clear-cut way to be certain a patient has it. But Minnesota scientists now believe they have found a long-sought PTSD fingerprint that confirms the disorder by measuring electromagnetic fields in the brain. The finding, detailed in the latest issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering, could help the 300,000 cases of PTSD anticipated among the 2 million U.S. troops who have gone to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“This shows that PTSD is a brain disease,” says Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, who led the research along with Brian Engdahl, and a team from the Brain Sciences Center at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center and University of Minnesota. “There have been questions that this is a made-up disorder and isn’t a true brain disease, but it is.” Just as importantly, he says, the magnetic-imaging biomarker shows changes over time in a brain’s electrical activity, allowing mental-health workers to chart the effectiveness of various therapies. “It will be a tremendous tool in monitoring treatment,” he says, “because these abnormal communication patterns will be normalized as the treatment works.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1956315,00.html?hpt=T2#ixzz0deGeRNPQ
A better diagnositic tool and a clearer diagnosis is welcome news. It should be a relief for those who suffer from PTSD. My fear is that the most prescribed treatment will be only a chain of medications.
I have found that many who suffer from PTSD have little or no stress management skills. By teaching them relaxation, biofeedback and other self-mastery skills their level of stress decreases, old stress injuries are healed and their ability to weather future stress is greatly enhanced and upgraded.
Dr Tim Lowenstein (c) 2009 All Rights Reserved
Contact Dr Tim for permission to reprint. info@stressmarket.com 
January 26th, 2010
This is interesting. Apparently, I have PTSD. I’m also an addict in recovery. This idea about relaxation makes perfect sense to me. The twelve-step process has taught me to relax. Before I ‘got it’, however, medication helped. I believe in medication if it helps. But I choose to use it as a band-aid when I need it, instead of every day forever ‘as prescribed’. I have a lot of stress-provoking stuff going on in my life right now. But I’m okay with it. It’s peripheral stuff that would have made me nuts without medication a few years ago.
I’d been taking Lexapro for a couple of years, I stopped taking it once, tapered myself even (Dr. Me, back in the saddle-nice). It was not a good thing at that time. But at this time, it seems to me a good thing. I have some better coping skills than I did a year ago.
I quit smoking and caffeine/coffee 24 days ago. After not taking the Lexapro. I’m not irritable, I feel pretty good actually. You know what it is? I didn’t know I didn’t feel like myself until I felt like myself. Right now, without all that foolishness in my system, psych meds included, I feel less intimidated by the overwhelm going on than I did two months ago, three, four months ago while I was ON the meds (and cigarettes, and too much coffee).
I’ll see what happens. But for right now, I’m all good.