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Brain Amygdala Volume Increases in Veterans and Active-Duty Military Personnel With Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury
Published Web Location
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814512/No data is associated with this publication.
Abstract
Objective
To identify amygdalar volumetric differences associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in individuals with comorbid mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) compared with those with mTBI-only and to examine the effects of intracranial volume (ICV) on amygdala volumetric measures.Setting
Marine Corps Base and VA Healthcare System.Participants
A cohort of veterans and active-duty military personnel with combat-related mTBI (N = 89).Design
Twenty-nine participants were identified with comorbid PTSD and mTBI. The remaining 60 formed the mTBI-only control group. Structural images of brains were obtained with a 1.5-T MRI scanner using a T1-weighted 3D-IR-FSPGR pulse sequence. Automatic segmentation was performed in Freesurfer.Main measures
Amygdala volumes with/without normalizations to ICV.Results
The comorbid mTBI/PTSD group had significantly larger amygdala volumes, when normalized to ICV, compared with the mTBI-only group. The right and left amygdala volumes after normalization to ICV were 0.122% ± 0.012% and 0.118% ± 0.011%, respectively, in the comorbid group compared with 0.115% ± 0.012% and 0.112% ± 0.009%, respectively, in the mTBI-only group (corrected P < .05).Conclusions
The ICV normalization analysis performed here may resolve previous literature discrepancies. This is an intriguing structural finding, given the role of the amygdala in the challenging neuroemotive symptoms witnessed in casualties of combat-related mTBI and PTSD.Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.