Experts say about 8 percent of the general population will suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. The number gets much higher in the veteran population. How a person handles trauma - ranging from street crime to child abuse - may depend on their DNA.
NECN’s Ally Donnelly explains.
24-year-old Kevin Lambert was in Iraq for 16 months. The now discharged army gunner has seen things in war he’ll never forget.
"You have a lot of the trouble sleeping’, the trouble falling asleep, the anxiety...the day dreaming...I call them day nightmares.”
The Dracut man is one of the many combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It can be very debilitating to your life if say you don’t want to take public transportation because you don’t like crowds because you were in a crowd and somebody blew up.”
But doctors say the way Lambert reacts after a roadside bomb may be completely different than another soldier.
About 50-70 percent of people will suffer a traumatic event in their lifetimes, but most of them will not develop PTSD.
Dr. Jordan Smoller is a psychiatrist at Mass General Hospital in Boston. He researches anxiety and mood disorders and calls a new study on PTSD very significant. Researchers out of Emory University have found that if a person has variations in a specific gene that helps regulate stress, doctors may be able to predict whether or not that person will suffer from PTSD after a traumatic event.
“It does begin to suggest a story for how genes and environment may interact, how nature and nurture interact in some degree in causing risk for mental health conditions.”
Researchers studied 900 adults—the majority of whom had been abused as children. They found people with the gene variants scored twice as high on a scale measuring post-traumatic stress than people without it.
“The more we learn about it, the more we might be able to develop effective treatments.”
Dr. Smoller says the work must be replicated in other studies. He also cautions that there is a much more complex system of genes in play in mental health disorders, but says knowledge gleaned may help doctors not only develop new drugs, but get childhood trauma survivors more targeted psycho-social therapies before symptoms become ingrained.
“The environment can have a big effect both in increasing risk and in increasing resilience.”
Lambert, an outreach worker for the Veteran’s Administration, doesn’t know much about scientific studies, but says the time to address PTSD is now.
“Opposed to 10-15 years from now when families are falling apart, we want these people to have great quality of life and live the life they want to live after everything they’ve done.”
