Previous Page  10 / 11 Next Page
Information
Show Menu
Previous Page 10 / 11 Next Page
Page Background

Page 41

3

rd

International Conference on

Health Care and

Health Management

Joint Event

&

November 04-05, 2019 | Prague, Czech Republic

6

th

International Conference on

Neuroscience and

Neurological Disorders

Journal of Neurology and Clinical Neuroscience | Volume 3

Cognitive flexibility predicts PTSD symptoms: Observational and interventional

studies

Ziv Ben-Zion

Sagol Brain Institute Tel-Aviv, Israel

Introduction:

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) is

a prevalent, severe and tenacious psychopathological

consequence of traumatic events. Neurobehavioral

mechanisms underlying PTSD pathogenesis have been

identified and may serve as risk-resilience factors during

the early aftermath of trauma exposure. Longitudinally

documenting the neurobehavioral dimensions of early

responses to trauma may help characterize survivors at risk

and inform mechanism-based interventions. We present two

independent longitudinal studies that repeatedly probed

clinical symptoms and neurocognitive domains in recent

trauma survivors. We hypothesized that better neurocognitive

functioning shortly after trauma will be associated with

less severe PTSD symptoms a year later, and that an early

neurocognitive intervention will improve cognitive functioning

and reduce PTSD symptoms.

Methods:

Participants in both studies were adult survivors

of traumatic events admitted to two general hospitals’

emergency departments (EDs) in Israel. The studies used

identical clinical and neurocognitive tools, which included

assessment of PTSD symptoms and diagnosis, and a battery

of neurocognitive tests. The first study evaluated 181

trauma-exposed individuals one-, six-, and fourteen months

following trauma exposure. The second study evaluated

97 trauma survivors one month after trauma exposure,

randomly allocated to 30 days of web-based neurocognitive

intervention (n=50) or control tasks (n=47) and re-evaluated

all subjects three- and six months after trauma exposure.

Results:

In the first study, individuals with better cognitive

flexibility at one-month post-trauma showed significantly

less severe PTSD symptoms after 13 months (p=0.002). In

the second study, the neurocognitive training group showed

more improvement in cognitive flexibility post-intervention

(p=0.019), and lower PTSD symptoms sixmonths post-trauma

(p=0.017), compared with controls. Intervention-induced

improvement in cognitive flexibility positively correlated with

clinical improvement (p=0.002).

Discussion:

Cognitiveflexibility,shortlyaftertraumaexposure,

emerged as a significant predictor of PTSD symptom severity.

It was also ameliorated by a neurocognitive intervention

and associated with a better treatment outcome. These

findings support further research into the implementation of

mechanism-driven neurocognitive preventive interventions

for PTSD.

e

:

zivbz1@gmail.com