New Target for PTSD Treatment Found

Researchers have found a promising new therapeutic target that could lead to better drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

A research team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found a promising new therapeutic target that could lead to better drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Mount Sinai's Alexander Neumeister and colleagues got together with the Yale Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Center to image the brains of patients with and without PTSD. They found that serotonin 1B levels were quite a bit lower in the group of patients diagnosed with PTSD than in patients who did not have the condition, and slightly lower in the patients who had been exposed to trauma but did not have PTSD.

The researchers also found that the younger the trauma victim, the longer-lasting the neurobiological and psychological effects on PTSD patients.