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Researchers want to target trauma directly in the brains of people with PTSD
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LISTEN: Researchers at Emory University’s School of Medicine are looking for patients to enroll in a new clinical trial to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. GPB’s Ellen Eldridge has the details.
Researchers at Emory’s Brain Health Center say they’ve located the part of the brain damaged by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that regulates and suppresses fear and can get stuck on “high alert” in traumatized people.
They want to see if they can target and break up those traumas by placing a magnetic coil on the scalp that sends nerve impulses to the brain, said Dr. Sanne van Rooij with Emory University.
An overactive amygdala is preventing people from recovery from PTSD, experts say.
One of the new treatments is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with the goal to dampen the fear center, and facilitate this unlearning of fear, van Rooij said.
“But the amygdala is very deep in the brain, and we cannot get there with TMS,” van Rooij said. “So, we used this method to find the area on the outside of the brain that we can target with TMS that talks to the amygdala.”
The clinical study seeks 60 people with PTSD symptoms for a two-week, outpatient study.
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