Peripheral and Central Mechanisms Involved in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Its Treatment by Eye-movement Desensitization & Reprocessing

Résumé du livre

Although most people encounter at least one traumatic event over their lifetime, not all of them will develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Lifetime prevalence of full-blown PTSD, known as an anxiety disorder, is in fact around 10%. In addition to accidents, aggression, grief, rape, fires, traumatic events can be caused by natural (flooding, earthquake...) or man-made stressors (war, terrorism...). With the contemporary rise in traumatic sources the World Health Organization recent reports describe PTSD as an increasing global health issue, due to its high frequency, severity, comorbidity and cost. A body of research has thus started investigating various aspects of PTSD concerned with intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, emotional deficits, cognitive disturbances and memory issues. Similarly to other mental health problems, much remains unknown about PTSD, and similarly to other anxiety disorders it is marked by excessive fear. It comes as no surprise that the most prevalent hypothesis in PTSD is that of a fear-processing deficit. Conceptualizing PTSD as a fear disorder can be phenomenologically quite narrow. It has been nonetheless pragmatic in allowing thorough translational research from animal to bench-side and clinical studies. Most studies have suggested that central and peripheral impairments in PTSD revolve around altered neural fear processing network. These alterations involve mechanisms implicated in fear conditioning, as well as emotional and attentional processing, all of which are altered in PTSD.