NYT Article: "What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological?"

Jason Perry

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This is an important article from the NY Times:

"What if PTSD Is More Physical Than Psychological?" http://nyti.ms/1TZ2Te1

"A new study supports what a small group of military researchers has suspected for decades:
that modern warfare destroys the brain.
By ROBERT F. WORTH JUNE 10, 2016:

"In early 2012, a neuropathologist named Daniel Perl was examining a slide of human brain tissue when he saw something odd and unfamiliar in the wormlike squiggles and folds. It looked like brown dust; a distinctive pattern of tiny scars. Perl was intrigued. At 69, he had examined 20,000 brains over a fourdecade career, focusing mostly on Alzheimer’s and other degenerative disorders. He had peered through his microscope at countless malformed proteins and twisted axons. He knew as much about the biology of brain disease as just about anyone on earth. But he had never seen anything like this.
The brain under Perl’s microscope belonged to an American soldier who had been five feet away when a suicide bomber detonated his belt of explosives in 2009. The soldier survived the blast, thanks to his body armor, but died two years later of an apparent drug overdose after suffering symptoms that have become the hallmark of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: memory loss, cognitive problems, inability to sleep and profound, often suicidal depression.

Nearly 350,000 service members have been given a diagnosis of traumatic brain injury over the past 15 years, many of them from blast exposure. The real number is likely to be much higher, because so many who have enlisted are too proud to report a wound that remains invisible...."

Read this article. It has no "answers" but suggest real problems with blast injuries and their impact on Servicemembers. The article is focused on medical issues, but, I think it has a definite tie in to legal and administrative treatment of Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, Sailors and other branches that have suffered from PTSD and blast injuries.
 
Brain plasticity has been on the table for discussion for some time as a possible cause of PTSD. The challenge is knowing whether the difference EPTS and made person susceptible to PTSD or if combat changed the brain structure. Both are possibilities.
 
I suspected it was far more than internal mental processes as much as chemical and physical changes to the brain when exposed to extreme conditions only found in modern warfare.

Thanks for sharing.
 
One of the other interesting things is within 6 hours of a traumatic brain injury, an individual will have intestinal permeability (you have tight junctions that prevent this). With intestinal permeability comes many different things-autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, Thyroid dysfunction, Sjogren's and a plethora of other auto-immune like disorders). To add to it, this intestinal permeability can lead to impermeability in other areas where there are these same cells and one of these areas is the blood-brain barrier. When this looses its integrity there is a whole lot of inflammation. Not only inflammation from the TBI, but inflammation of the breach in the integrity of this barrier. Adding to this chronic stress and PTSD will also cause intestinal permeability and change the microbiome of the organisms in the gut. These are huge players in the immune system. I truly believe these are two of the biggest reasons we see strange neurological disorders and unexplained symptoms in service members.
 
One of the other interesting things is within 6 hours of a traumatic brain injury, an individual will have intestinal permeability (you have tight junctions that prevent this). With intestinal permeability comes many different things-autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, Thyroid dysfunction, Sjogren's and a plethora of other auto-immune like disorders). To add to it, this intestinal permeability can lead to impermeability in other areas where there are these same cells and one of these areas is the blood-brain barrier. When this looses its integrity there is a significant inflammation~not only inflammation from the TBI, but inflammation of the breach in the integrity of this barrier. Adding to this, chronic stress and PTSD will also cause intestinal permeability and change the microbiome of the organisms in the gut. These are huge players in the immune system. I truly believe these are two of the biggest reasons we see strange neurological disorders and unexplained symptoms in service members with TBI/PTSD.
 
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