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Ziv Ben-Zion
Sagol Brain Institute Tel-Aviv, Israel
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Neurol Clin Neurosci
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 six months post-trauma
(p=0.017), compared with controls. Intervention-induced
improvement in cognitive flexibility positively correlated with
clinical improvement (p=0.002).
Discussion: Cognitive flexibility, shortly after trauma exposure,
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-mail: zivbz1@gmail.com
+44 73620 49920
