The effects of posttraumatic stress disorder on learning and memory

¶ … Posttraumatic Stress Disorder on learning and memory. The writer uses to peer reviewed journal articles to analyze the topic and draw conclusions. In addition a third source is selected to strengthen the writer's argument.

COMPARISION and CONTRAST of TWO ARTICLES RE: PTSD

For many years, it was believed by the general public that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder was a disorder that exclusively impacted war veterans. With a focus on those returning from Vietnam the medical and mental health field began to study the phenomena of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and were able to identify symptoms, impact on life and come up with methods for treatment. Eventually, the experts began looking outside the veteran population and finding that many people who have never been to war, or even in the service, were also subjects of the disorder (Roth, 1995).

Today, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is a widely recognized disorder in response to an intense and overwhelming physical trauma or psychological trauma.

In 1991 Terr and Pynoos et al. provided careful documentation through research that PTSD does occur in young children and adolescents (Roth, 1995).

While there are many disorders that manifest themselves differently in children than they do adults, the manifestations of PTSD are strikingly similar in both younger, and older populations. Examples of PTSD in children have been documented in Cambodian children populations following concentration camp experiences, as well as children or teens who have witnessed homicides or other traumatic deaths.

In addition, victims of sexual or physical abuse have developed PTSD in response to that abuse.

These and other research studies have contributed to the current acceptance and validity of the diagnosis of PTSD.

Family and personal history of anxiety has been shown to sometimes predict the later onset of PTSD (Roth, 1995).

Article Summary

At this point in history, it is commonly accepted that PTSD interferes with memory. In addition, recent attention has been paid to the impact PTSD has on learning and attention in those who have the disorder. To fully understand how to address this element of PTSD it becomes important to target, ascertain and analyze how and why the memory, learning and attention functions are affected by it (Lindauer et al. 1999).

One recent study examined the relationship between smaller hippocampal volume and how it affects cortisol, memory, learning and attention in police officers diagnosed with PTSD.

The article proposed a relationship between stress-induced hippocampal and memory impairments for police officers who had been diagnosed with the disorder. The study piggy backed onto an earlier study related to the same topic, however, this study focused on changes in and associations between cortisol, memory, attention and learning as they relate to hipocampal volume in PTSD (Lindauer et al. 1999).

The research used medical imaging results from 12 police officers with PTSD and 12 police officers who had been through traumatic events but did not develop PTSD.

Significantly smaller hippocampi and higher early morning salivary cortisol levels were found in PTSD. Subjects with PTSD performed worse on a delayed visual memory recall task at trend level, and made more perseverations and intrusions on a verbal memory task (Lindauer et al. 1999). Negative correlations were found between PTSD symptom severity and immediate recall function, and between re-experiencing symptoms and left hippocampal volume. A positive correlation was found between salivary cortisol level in early morning and right hippocampal volume; however, hippocampal volume did not correlate with memory (Lindauer et al. 1999)."

When the two populations were examined and analyzed through the use of medical imaging results, it was concluded that higher cortisol levels and reduced hippocampi combined with impairments of memory were associated with cases of PTSD, however, they could not be directly correlated to each other. The research also concluded that reduced hippocampai did not seem to have a direct impact on memory impairment for police officers diagnosed with PTSD (Lindauer et al. 1999).

The article does summarize several PTSD symptoms including intrusive and persistent memories of the trauma as well as marked avoidance of any stimuli that can be related to the trauma.

This study was an important contributor to the question of memory and learning issues as they related to PTSD by ruling out, at least in this research, the possibility that these issues can be traced to and attributed to smaller or reduced hipocampi.

Earlier studies had in fact found that Vietnam veterans with PTSD did have an eight percent reduced volume of hippocami than those without PTSD. This lead researchers to ask whether it was a causation event. This later research demonstrated that it was not.

The second article involves a study of PTSD and its impact on learning and memory through a program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (Taylor, et al., 2005). In this particular study the focus was placed on aging veterans who had witnessed combat during their tours of duty.

The research used two groups, one group of veterans had PTSD while the second group did. The study examined several memory and learning brain functions with relation to PTSD and found that veterans who had PTSD showed "many" impairments when compared to those veterans in the study that did not have a diagnosis of PTSD. However, in correlating the data it was concluded that the only real time the PTSD group was consistently discriminated from the non-PTSD group was in the area of long-delay free recall.

The study noted that Holocaust survivors had similar results when they were part of previous research into PTSD (Taylor, et al., 2005).

The purpose of the study was to determine if there were age related learning and memory issues that would not present in younger PTSD patients. This hypothesis was based in earlier research that did correlate aging as well as PTSD in learning and memory issues for Holocaust survivors (Taylor, et al., 2005).

The study used 66 male veterans from which 53 had experienced combat during one or more of their tours of duty (Taylor, et al., 2005).

The veterans included WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War participants. The remaining 15 veterans had not been sent to combat zones and did not experience any trauma related to being in the military during their time in the service.

Participants were located through advertisements, and if they agreed to become part of the study, they were asked to have a psychological evaluation to determine whether they understood what the study was about (Taylor, et al., 2005).

Those with bipolar, psychosis, or organic mental disorder were excluded.

This was important as it preserved the purity and validity of the results.

To test the learning and memory functions of the participants they were put through a battery of tests including the WAIS-R Voc and Block Design tests.

The results of this study demonstrate that aging combat veterans with PTSD show a wide range of memory impairments compared to veterans unexposed to combat, but a more limited set of impairments compared to similarly exposed combat veterans without PTSD (Taylor, et al., 2005)."

Merits

The merits of each article have to do with the way the questions were framed. They were presented in such a way that the reader naturally was able to draw parallels and conclusions between the two.

The second article in particular had a defensible hypothesis as it looked at aging veterans with PTSD which was a narrowed and specific enough population to test the question with reasonable confidence in the accuracy of the results.

The methods in each study were appropriate so that they addressed the question. The first study concentrated on the medical imaging to determine the answers while the second asked participants to demonstrate through exercises.

While both studies warranted and validated the authors' findings, the second study produced a more interesting result, given the comparison that it provided to the Holocaust survivors in earlier studies and the studies conducted on younger people with PTSD.

Overall Assessment

Overall each of the articles contribute significantly to the study of PTSD. The impact of memory and learning issues for those that have the disorder should not be downplayed as such issues can negatively impact the quality of life for those with the disorder.

Each of the articles provide answers to disqualify certain hypotheses and qualified others as worth further study Overall Assessment.

With each of the articles the medical and mental health community came one step closer to targeting and discovering exactly where the problem is in learning and memory issues for people with PTSD. Even when the answer is, "no" that is not where the problem is, it helps narrow down where in fact the problem does originate from.