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 Research & Giving News Article  Can Damage Children’s Brain Development Study reveal decrease in the size of a key brain structure The study, published in the March 2007 issue of Pediatrics, was led by Victor Carrion, M.D., assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and director of Stanford’s early life stress program and a NARSAD 2000Young Investigator Award recipient. Co-authors were professor of psychiatry Allan Reiss, M.D., and Carl Weems, Ph.D., now an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Orleans. Dr. Carrion explains that the goal of his research is to understand both the long-term effects of PTSD, which can lead to adult depression and anxiety, among other problems, and why some children, whether because of environmental factors or genetic predisposition, are more resilient than others to traumatic events. Dr. Carrion and his team followed 15 children, aged 7 to 13, over a period of 12 to 18 months during which their hippocampal volume was measured. The researchers found that the children who had shown the most severe PTSD symptoms and had highest bedtime levels of the stress hormone cortisol at the start of the study were those likely to wind up with reductions in hippocampal volume. While this effect had been observed before in animal studies, this was the first time it has been replicated in children. The change in hippocampal volume corresponded to both PTSD severity and the increase in cortisol levels. Cortisol belongs to a class of glucocorticoid hormones that have been shown to kill hippocampal cells in animals. Reduction in hippocampal size can make it even more difficult to deal with trauma. This, in turn, raises stress and cortisol levels even more, causing still more damage. “One common treatment for PTSD,” Dr. Carrion says, “is to help the sufferer develop a narrative for the traumatic experience. But if the stress of the event affects areas of the brain responsible for processing information, that treatment may not be effective.” Dr. Carrion and his colleagues are now using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualize how children’s brains differ when performing emotional and cognitive tasks. Their hope is that what they learn can lead to the development of more effective, targeted interventions to relieve the effects of PTSD. The study was supported by grants from the National Institute of Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Aloha Foundation and NARSAD. NARSAD: The Mental Health Research Association received permission from Stanford University School of Medicine to adapt their press release on this news story. |
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