Researchers at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem have discovered that a simple blood test might enable psychiatrists to predict if a person will develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), while still in the emergency room, a few hours after the traumatic event occurred.
PTSD as it is known, is characterized by symptoms such as sleeping disorders, difficulty in concentrating, irritability, nightmares and flashbacks to the traumatic event. These symptoms may persist months and years later.
The results of the first-ever findings, published in the prestigious journal Molecular Psychiatry, describe how the researchers looked for and discovered a physiological signature in peripheral blood cells of activities that mainly take place in the brain. Their research methodology was innovative in itself. They examined thousands of possible markers at once, using the best available technology at the time.
The test group included 24 people who were diagnosed as “shock casualties” in the emergency room after experiencing a traumatic event; and 12 of whom developed PTSD four months later. Each gave a blood test in the emergency room and another four months later. The laboratory examination revealed hundreds of various markers for PTSD in those who had it, and no markers at all in the healthy group.
The researchers believe that after some improvement in the testing process, it will be possible to predict the PTSD symptoms. Hadasit, the Hadassah subsidiary in charge of promoting and commercializing intellectual properties generated at Hadassah, has already patented the findings of the research and is in advanced stages of developing a commercial diagnostic kit for PTSD.
“Now that we have found the signals, we are going to concentrate on detecting the genes, to shed more light on the biological processes in our bodies that cause mental diseases, and from this – to develop ways to prevent such diseases,” said Prof. Arie Shalev, head of Hadassah's Department of Psychiatry, who led the research with Dr. Ronen Segman of the Psychiatric Laboratory at Hadassah University Hospital-Mt. Scopus. Lab work was done by Dr. Segman and Tanya Goltzer-Dubner. Prof. Nir Friedman and Noa Shefi from the Hebrew University’s Department of Computer Science did the computerized digitations of the data, and Prof. Naftali Kaminski from Sheba Hospital helped in the laboratory part of the research