Abstract
Prior structural imaging studies of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have observed smaller volumes of the hippocampus and cingulate cortex, yet little is known about the integrity of white matter connections between these structures in PTSD samples. The few published studies using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to measure white matter integrity in PTSD have described individuals with focal trauma rather than chronically stressed individuals, which limits generalization of findings to this population; in addition, these studies have lacked traumatized comparison groups without PTSD. The present DTI study examined microstructural integrity of white matter tracts in a sample of highly traumatized African-American women with (n=25) and without (n=26) PTSD using a tract-based spatial statistical approach, with threshold-free cluster enhancement. Our findings indicated that, relative to comparably traumatized controls, decreased integrity (measured by fractional anisotropy) of the posterior cingulum was observed in participants with PTSD (p<0.05). These findings indicate that reduced microarchitectural integrity of the cingulum, a white matter fiber that connects the entorhinal and cingulate cortices, appears to be associated with PTSD symptomatology. The role of this pathway in problems that characterize PTSD, such as inadequate extinction of learned fear, as well as attention and explicit memory functions, are discussed.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the participants who made this work possible, as well as the staff of the Grady Trauma Project, particularly Allen W Graham, Angelo Brown, Amreen Dharani, Jennifer S Davis, Jennifer Winkler, Sarah Spann, and William Holland. We thank Jaemin Shin for his valuable assistance with data analysis, and the Georgia State University-Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Brain Imaging for data support. This work was primarily supported by National Institutes of Mental Health (R01MH071537 to KJR) and (F32MH095456 to NF; co-mentors: TZK and KJR). Support was also received from PHS Grant UL1 RR025008 from the Clinical and Translational Science Award program, National Institutes of Health, National Center for Research Resources, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (KJR). Dr Fani and Dr Ressler's work was funded by the NIH, as noted above.
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Fani, N., King, T., Jovanovic, T. et al. White Matter Integrity in Highly Traumatized Adults With and Without Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Neuropsychopharmacol 37, 2740–2746 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2012.146
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2012.146
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