Prof. Rachel Yehuda

Ponència	Nou desenvolupament en el trastorn de l’estrès posttraumàtic (TEPT)
Dates	7 Setembre - 9 Setembre, 2020
Taula rodona 5	Psicopatologia induïda per la violència: Victimització i Estrès

Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D. isa Professor and Vice Chair of Psychiatry, and Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA. She is also the Mental Health Patient Care Center Director at the Bronx Veterans Affairs. She has published several hundred scientific papers and compiled over 10 books examining diverse aspects of traumatic stress, and has studied PTSD and resilience in combat veterans, survivors of genocide, interpersonal violence and terrorism, as well as in animal models. Her work has focused on neuroendocrinology, neuroimaging, genomic and molecular biological studies of trauma, experimental therapeutics (pharmacological and psychotherapy trials), biomarkers, genetic and epigenetic heritability, gender differences, and suicide.

This presentation will focus on recent developments in post-traumatic stress disorder, tracing the concept from its original origins. The diagnosis of PTSD was established to fill a gap in psychiatry, which previously did not have a method of classifying or understanding long-term effects of stress. This gap largely occurred because prevailing models of the effects of stress emphasized acute responses that were transient in nature and designed to result in recovery and homeostasis. The idea that patients report that exposure to traumatic experiences are transformative can be best understood in the context of advances on molecular biology, and particular epigenetics. Whereas early work in PTSD focused on stress hormone alterations, the addition of molecular studies examining epigenetic changes in stress related genes has allowed the field to understand how environmental events can produce changes to the way genes function. This explains the subjective feeling many trauma survivors have that they are no longer "the same person they used to be." Advances in epidemiology have also pointed to the fact that biological underpinnings of PTSD may not be fully explained by trauma exposure. It has been interesting to note that rates of PTSD differ according to trauma type, gender, and by culture. That cultural differences may play a role in trauma prevalence across the goal indicates that biological correlates of PTSD may reflect subjective processes associated with cognition and interpretation of the impact of trauma. As the field develops methods for understanding individualized biological responses to trauma, it is possible to use genome-wide approaches to better understanding treatment matching strategies. Among the major developments in the field are the development of newer and improved biomarkers that allow an understanding of highly individualized responses in human tissue. The implications of these developments for treatments is discussed.