Medical post-traumatic stress disorder: catching up with the cutting edge in stress research

doi:10.1186/cc5697

Critical Care
Volume 11
Issue 1

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Commentary

Medical post-traumatic stress disorder: catching up with the cutting edge in stress research

Craig Weinert¹ and William Meller²

¹Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis MN 55455, USA

²Department of Psychiatry, University of Minnesota Medical School, 420 Delaware St SE, Minneapolis MN 55455, USA

author email corresponding author email

Critical Care 2007, 11:118doi:10.1186/cc5697


Published:	27 February 2007

See related research by Boer et al., http://ccforum.com/content/11/1/R30, related research by Jackson et al., http://ccforum.com/content/11/1/R27, and related research by Girard et al., http://ccforum.com/content/11/1/R28

Abstract

We briefly summarize two original research papers and a review article. We then review the formal structure of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and discuss the use of continuous measures of PTSD in comparison with diagnostic instruments. Problems with distinguishing incident from prevalent PTSD cases lead to questions of whether medical PTSD is a new important problem. By examining current studies, we demonstrate that medical PTSD is lagging in fundamental and interventional research but we discuss how medical PTSD has unique opportunities to develop causal models that could inform the greater field of stress studies. We conclude by advocating that future medical PTSD research efforts should focus on understanding how fundamental brain processes are affected during acute medical stress.