Preventing PTSD

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop after life-threatening psychological trauma and although it affects almost one in 10 Canadians, there are still no specific drug treatments.

Now, after 30 years of research into the brain, Dr. Fang Liu has developed what may become the world’s first blood test to determine whether someone is at risk for PTSD. A protein complex that includes the receptor for the stress hormone cortisol, is abnormally and persistently elevated in patients with PTSD.

“The idea of preventing mental illness is something very new and exciting. PTSD is an unusual illness in which there is a clear precipitant, the trauma, and a delay before the onset of symptoms. That gives you a window for prevention and our work in early diagnosis is progressing very well. That’s the beauty of our finding. If we can predict who will develop PTSD, we could potentially intervene and prevent them from getting it.”

While PTSD is commonly associated with first responders and military personnel, Dr. Liu says the majority of CAMH patients are just ordinary people, many of them women who are victims of domestic or childhood abuse. She also says that because many people never seek treatment for PTSD, the prevalence is likely even higher than generally reported. Years after her first study on PTSD treatment and prevention was published, she still gets letters from around the world from people asking if they can participate in research trials.

The implications of Dr. Liu’s work with these proteins goes beyond PTSD. She believes that protein interactions may be a more general brain regulatory mechanism for other disorders such as depression, schizophrenia and even multiple sclerosis, for which better treatments are also needed. She is currently working with CAMH colleague Dr. Neil Vasdev, one of the world’s leading creators of neuroscience positron emission tomography (PET) radiotracers, to explore with unprecedented precision the role these proteins play in the brain.

“I cannot tell you how excited I am,” says Dr. Liu about the potential of these and other neurological biomarkers under investigation at CAMH. “This will totally change the way we understand psychiatry and mental illness.”