Summary

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the most common war-related psychiatric disorder occurring among combat veterans and other people exposed to war zone stress. In addition to health problems, this disorder causes numerous long-term socioeconomic damages. Current opinion is that the best results in PTSD understanding, diagnosis and treatment could be achieved by integrating psychological, biological and pharmacotherapeutical approaches.

General objective of this project is to better understand the biological basis of psychophysical profiles of PTSD patients. The study will focus on establishing multiple correlations of different PTSD subtypes with relevant psychological, biochemical, endocrinological, genetic, physiological and anthropometric parameters.

The psychological and biological studies in this project will be performed on five groups of subjects: a) PTSD patients, b) subjects with PTSD in remission, c) traumatized subjects without PTSD, d) healthy controls from Western Balkans, and e) healthy controls from Western Europe . All subjects in these groups will be male. Additionally, the same psychological studies will be performed on five analogous groups of female subjects. The traumatic experiences of the first three groups (of both genders) are war-related.

The main psychological instruments to be used are personality inventories and dissociation questionnaires. Biological measurements will encompass parameters related to hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical axis (including cortisol receptor and its gene polymorphism), anthropometry, body composition, lipid status, insulin resistance, and sleep disturbances.
After an advanced statistical analysis of the data, this study will yield new knowledge on relations between: a) basic psychological variables and PTSD, b) biological variables and PTSD, and c) biological and basic psychological variables in health and in PTSD. In addition, the foreseen benefits of the project include: d) development of combined psycho-biological batteries for PTSD screening, diagnosing and risk factors assessing, e) improvement of psychological instruments for measuring PTSD, f) implementation of new biological markers for PTSD, g) recommendation for the improvement of combined psycho- and pharmacotherapy of PTSD.