14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists believe they may have found one of the reasons why military personnel returning home from wars have such a high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They say it's all connected to the way the brain returns to normal after a person has been exposed to a traumatic experience.
Our brains have several defense mechanisms that enable us to handle most types of stressful situations, even if only instinctively. But equally as important as solving the problems is how the brain returns to normal activity patterns after the stressful moments are behind us.
When we are dealing with a dangerous situation, the brain kicks in a fight-or-flight response, which means that it makes a split-second decision about whether to stay and face the aggressor, or run for safety. This mechanism has been hard-wired in our minds by millions of years of evolution.
According to neuroscientists, it is undesirable to see people exhibit no feelings of fear or anxiety. In the right amount, these emotions can help people more than they know. But problems start to appear when the brain's response to potentially-dangerous situations goes out of whack.
When a person becomes incapable of “turning off” their stress response, then there is a large change that they will develop a host of problems, including anorexia, anxiety disorders, depression and PTSD.
In the new study, the research team wanted to know how was it that the brain responded to acute stress or other types of severe shocks. The work was conducted by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
WI Neurobiology Department expert Dr. Alon Chen was the leader of the effort, that was concentrated on studying a family of proteins believed to play a large role in determining how stress affects the brain. The protein called CRF is a part of this family.
Three other members, called urocortin 1, 2 and 3, were found to play a role in shutting down stress response in the brain, after the dangerous situation had passed. Details of the study were published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Our findings imply that the urocortin system plays a central role in regulating stress responses, and this may have implications for such diseases as anxiety disorders, depression and anorexia,” the research team writes in the journal entry.
“The genetically engineered mice we created could be effective research models for these diseases,” they conclude, quoted by PsychCentral.