What does therapy look like for someone with PTSD?

"Current therapies for anxiety disorders and PTSD focus on learning that cues associated with the trauma are no longer fear-provoking. Patients often undergo exposure therapy to reduce their fear of situations and stimuli associated with trauma. Although exposure therapy is often effective, pathological fear and anxiety are known to return or relapse under many circumstances. This occurs, for example, when trauma-related stimuli, which have come to be tolerated during therapy, are unexpectedly experienced outside of the clinical context. Relapse of fear after therapy has been estimated to occur in upwards of two-thirds of patients who undergo exposure therapy."

But your research could help clinicians better treat disorders like PTSD.

"Yes, that’s the hope. PTSD is a major debilitating disorder that affects an increasing number of people in the U.S. With depression, obsessive compulsive disorder or other mental illnesses, you don’t really know when the disorder begins. With PTSD, however, you have a moment in time where there’s a particularly traumatic event. Because we know when PTSD starts, we can model that traumatic experience very effectively in the lab using basic learning and memory procedures.

My research involves studying the relationship between three parts of the brain: the hippocampus, (which is involved in memory), the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. While the neurocircuit between the three has long been known to process fear, my studies have pinpointed connections between the hippocampus and a specific type of cell in the prefrontal cortex that is involved in a relapse of fear. This has widespread implications for treating fear disorders like PTSD in the future, as we now know what part of the brain to target."

Support Brain Science 

“Whether it’s mental health, mental illness, or neurological disorders and neurodegeneration, brain disorders touch almost everyone,” said Maren. “Even if you’re not personally afflicted, you likely have a family member or friend who is.”

Texas A&M’s Brain Science Initiative brings together faculty and student researchers to see the brain in action, offering a more thorough understanding of how people think, feel and interact. Trained in cutting-edge techniques for neuroimaging and psychophysiological measurements, researchers from colleges across Texas A&M seek answers to everything from obsessive-compulsive disorder to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Gifts to the Brain Science Initiative can pay for expensive imaging equipment and provide the personnel needed to lay the groundwork for federal funding of brain science research.

Contact Larry Walker '97 (below) if you're interested in supporting brain science research at Texas A&M.