14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists were finally able to demonstrate that the way the human immune system responds to the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is dependent on the gender of the patient.
In order to prove this hypothesis, experts conducted two new experiments, which showed that, while men had no immune response to the condition whatsoever, women had a very strong one.
Discovering these quite different bodily reactions is very important, the team behind the new work says, because it could lead to the development of new therapies that experts never thought of before.
Whenever the immune system is activated, it causes inflammation, and so investigators looked for signs of this effect when determining the extent to which immune systems get activated in the two genders.
Such investigations are very important because PTSD is a known risk factor for the development of conditions such as cardiovascular diseases and arthritis. On the other hand, immune system activation-induced inflammation is known to cause roughly the same side-effects.
During the new study, 24 male PTSD patients and 25 healthy control subjects were analyzed against a group of 10 female PTSD patients and 8 controls. Gene microarray technology was used to get a sense of how much each participant's immune system was activated, both in the body and in the brain.
“We were looking for evidence of inflammation caused by immune activation. We know that people with PTSD have higher rates of cardiovascular disease and arthritis, which are diseases associated with chronic inflammation,” says Thomas Neylan, MD.
“We also hoped that seeing which genes were expressed in PTSD might show us potential therapeutic approaches that we hadn’t thought of,” adds the expert, who is also the lead author of the investigation.
Men with and without PTSD exhibited the same amount of immune system activation, whereas women that had the condition exhibited a lot more inflammation than females who were healthy.
At this point, researchers are not yet sure about what is causing this difference among genders, PsychCentral reports. “The next step is to look at larger groups of men and women, and we are working on that,” the team leader adds.
According to a paper describing the findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, it could be that elevated protein and hormone production levels may somehow determine the difference.
However, the team admits that more work needs to be done before a clear conclusion can be drawn from all this.