Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can occur after exposure to an extremely traumatic event or stressor.  Most people who have gone through a traumatic event will initially exhibit some PTSD symptoms, but less than 10 percent will go on to develop the disorder.

Types of symptoms include:
•    reliving the event (flashbacks, hallucinations),
•    avoiding situations that remind you of the event (avoiding people or places that trigger memories of the event),
•    feeling numb (difficulty expressing feelings, lack of interest in activities previously enjoyed), and
•    feeling keyed up (hyperarousal).

Dr. Ruth Lanius conducts functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies at the CFMM with PTSD patients to investigate differences in brain activity between PTSD patients and normal volunteers (with no history of psychiatric illness) under a variety of different paradigms.  Some of the paradigms are:

•    self-recognition and related cognitive conditions where subjects view images of their own face and other faces,
•    self-reflection where subjects answer a series of questions about themselves,
•    thermal pain paradigm.

All studies hope to better characterise PTSD through examining changes in neural networks correlated with the incidence of PTSD resulting in the development of better biological (medications) and psychological treatments for the illness.