The Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD) has already delivered 20 postmortem human brains to the Boston VA Hospital from its vast collection of more than 1,500 extremely well-characterized brains. LIBD collects donated brains from healthy individuals and from people who suffered from a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Extensive clinical data on the individuals is maintained as well as matched skin cells wherever possible, making the collection a veritable treasure trove for researchers.
“We don’t know the structural changes associated with PTSD because we haven’t had this kind of brain bank before,” Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at Boston University who is overseeing the PTSD brain bank, explained to Mark Thompson of Time. “We’ve been diagnosing PTSD based on clinical symptoms, but we have not systematically characterized the pathology underlying this disorder.”
According to the National Academy of Sciences, as many as 20% of the 2.6 million American men and women who served in Afghanistan and Iraq may have PTSD and an estimated 6.8% of the general population will suffer from it at some point during their lives. The disorder often has debilitating and long-recurring symptoms for which there are few effective treatments today.
There are insights about the brain mechanisms involved in causing the disorder: “Memory, activation of fear circuits and anxiety circuits seem to be overly active in people with PTSD,” Dr. Thomas Hyde, Chief Operating Officer at LIBD, told Mr. Thompson. If we can get more precise information about the underlying brain biology linked to structural changes in the brains of individuals who lived with the disorder, we should be able to develop more effective preventive and intervention techniques.