Objective
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most common war-related psychiatric disorder occurring among combat veterans and other people exposed to war-zone stress. Current opinion is that the best results in PTSD understanding, diagnosis and treatment could be achieved by integrating psychological, biological and pharmacotherapeutical approaches.General objective of this project is to better understand the psychobiological basis of PTSD. The study will focus on establishing multiple correlations of d ifferent PTSD subtypes with relevant psychological, biochemical, endocrinological, genetic, physiological and anthropometric parameters. Five groups of subjects will be studied: a) patients with war-zone related PTSD, b) patients with war-zone related PTS D in remission, c) war-zone exposed subjects without PTSD, d) healthy controls from Western Balkans and e) healty controls from Western Europe. Subjects in these groups will be male. Psychological assessment will be performed on four analogous groups of female subjects. Psychological assessments include psychometrics, neuropsychological testing and personality assessment. Biological measurements will encompass parameters related to hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical axis (including cortisol receptor a nd its gene polymorphism), anthropometry, body composition, lipid status, insulin resistance, and sleep disturbances. This study will yield new knowledge on relations between: a) basic psychological variables and PTSD, b) biological variables and PTSD, a nd c) biological and basic psychological variables in health and in PTSD. In addition, the foreseen benefits of the project include: d) development of combined psycho-biological batteries for PTSD screening, diagnosing and risk factors assessing, e) impr ovement of psychological instruments for measuring PTSD, and f) implementation of new biological markers for PTSD
Fields of science
Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2002-INCO-WBC-1
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Funding Scheme
IP - Integrated ProjectCoordinator
UTRECHT
Netherlands