The article “Latent Trajectories of Trauma Symptoms and Resilience: The 3-Year Longitudinal Prospective USPER Study of Danish Veterans Deployed in Afghanistan” by Andersen and colleagues examines trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms from predeployment to 2.5 years postdeployment and the predictive factors of trajectory membership among a sample of Danish soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans face a number of psychological, physical, and social challenges perideployment and postdeployment.

Longitudinal research has associated the disposition toward self-enhancing biases with better adjustment following potentially traumatic events (PTEs). However, self-enhancement was always measured in these studies after the PTE, thus confounding it with exposure. This study used a prospective design that tracked PTEs in college students over a 4-year period using an online checklist (n = 69). Most participants experienced at least 1 PTE, and the mean number of PTEs was 4.40.

Lund and colleagues accurately mention that simply advocating against current benzodiazepine use in PTSD, without providing alternative strategies, is not an option. Future research is warranted, finding the optimal memory reactivation length may become a great clinical challenge of trial-and-error, as benzodiazepine administration may time-dependently both inhibit and promote forgetting in PTSD. (from the article)

Conclusions: There appears to be a high amount of somatic complaints in both tortured and non-tortured refugee patients with PTSD. This calls for new treatment strategies where there is more attention for somatic complaints. Further research should prove whether a specialised treatment with attention to function loss in somatic sense combined with psychological treatment has a greater effect on improvement in symptoms than psychological treatment only.

Traumatic exposure is a common experience among children and may have severe and long lasting effects on child’s mental well-being and development. This dissertation reports on children who have been exposed to one or more potentially traumatic events during their lives and focuses on identifying those children suffering from psychological trauma. The results presented in this thesis expand current knowledge with regard to the definition of a traumatic event and the different traumatic stress profiles between single trauma and child maltreatment.

The primary focus of this dissertation was to increase the knowledge about possible biological factors and psychopathological mechanisms (including HPA-axis functioning, one-carbon and fatty-acid metabolism), as well as some gene-environment interactions for the course of recurrent MDD (MDD-R). Studying MDD-R is important because there are indications that it represents a more biological and genetic determined MDD-subtype, which may be specifically linked to recurrence and CVD-risk.

Conclusion: There are no specific drugs for PTSD, except for the treatment of irritability and depressive features with SSRI. Atypical neuroleptics have been more recently been introduced as well as mood stabilizers. Other options are specific serotonergic agents such as 5-HT 1A antagonists, NA-blockers, CRF antagonists, GC-receptor antagonists, prazosin and á1-adrenergic blocker with nightmares, use of â-blockers early after trauma exposure are investigated.

OBJECTIVE: Identifying mediators of therapeutic change is important to the development of interventions and augmentation strategies. Threat reappraisal is considered a key mediator underlying the effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for anxiety disorders. The present study systematically reviewed the evidence for the threat reappraisal mediation hypothesis.

Psychiatric illnesses are under polygenic influence and are associated with interactions between genetic variants and environmental exposures.1 Gene–environment interactions might not only predict onset of disease, but genetic biomarkers might also help the clinician to select the optimal treatment for patients.2 However, there is a lack of studies on therapygenetics for psychological treatment of psychiatric diseases.