Can traumatic memories be erased?

Could veterans of war, rape victims and other people who have seen horrific crimes someday have the traumatic memories that haunt them weakened in their brains? In a new study, UCLA life scientists report a discovery that may make the reduction of such memories a reality.

 

"I think we will be able to alter memories someday to reduce the trauma from our brains," said the study's senior author, David Glanzman, a UCLA professor of integrative biology and physiology and of neurobiology.

 

The study appears in the April 27 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, a premier neuroscience journal.

 

Glanzman, a cellular neuroscientist, and his colleagues report that they have eliminated, or at least substantially weakened, a long-term memory in both the marine snail known as Aplysia and neurons in a Petri dish. The researchers say they are gaining important insights into the cell biology of long-term memory.

By Stuart Wolpert

Men’s and Women’s Immune Systems Respond Differently to PTSD

Men and women had starkly different immune system responses to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, with men showing no response and women showing a strong response, in two studies by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

While a robust immune response protects the body from foreign invaders, such as bacteria and viruses, an over-activated response causes inflammation, which can lead to such conditions as cardiovascular disease and arthritis.

In a study published in the March, 2011 issue of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, the authors took blood samples from 49 men (24 with PTSD and 25 controls) and 18 women (10 with PTSD and 8 controls). They then used gene microarray technology to determine which genes were activated in the subjects’ monocytes, which are immune cells that regularly cross the barrier between the bloodstream and the brain, and thus give a broad picture of immune reaction in both the body and brain.

by: Steve Tokar

More Marines now eligible to receive Purple Heart for TBI - News - Stripes

More Marines now eligible to receive Purple Heart for TBI - News - Stripes

WASHINGTON — It’s no longer necessary for Marines suffering from mild traumatic brain injuries to have been knocked unconscious to qualify for a Purple Heart, a retroactive change that could affect thousands of troops who have served in battle since Sept. 11, 2001.

Under a new fleetwide instruction, Marines who retain consciousness after a concussion may receive the medal if diagnosed by a medical officer as not fit for full duty “due to persistent signs, symptoms, or findings of functional impairment for a period greater than 48 hours from the time of the concussive incident.”

By CHRIS CARROLL

Tweaked helmet would better protect our troops

It is the "signature wound" of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars: traumatic brain injury from the blast of the enemy's improvised explosive devices. Now two researchers say that minor changes in the military's combat helmet could reduce the incidence and severity of these injuries.

Using complex computer modeling to determine the impact of such blasts on helmets, physicist Willy Moss and mechanical engineer Michael King of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California concluded that soldiers and Marines would be better protected by wearing a slightly larger helmet with 1/8 inch more foam padding.

"I'm almost embarrassed," King said, that the finding was so simple.

The two researchers had been selected by the Army and its Joint IED Defeat Organization, which is looking for better ways to protect military personnel against improvised explosive devices, to perform the yearlong, $540,000 study based on previous work on blast-induced traumatic brain injury.

By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

Coming Home: Helping Kids Reconnect After Deployment

Without question, the best part of deployment is coming home. But even after a joyful reunion, the weeks and months after homecoming can pose special challenges for your children, no matter their ages:

- Infants and small children (ages 0 to 3): may not remember you or be uncomfortable around you; like you’re a stranger. This is not abnormal and will diminish after a few weeks. Spending time with your child and generally being an active parent will help.

- Middle-age children (ages 4 to 12): may be overly clingy and affectionate, often because they’re afraid you’re going to leave again. Just be patient and explain that even though you’re leaving for work in the morning, you’ll be back in the evening. Constant reassurance should help with this problem. Also, make near-future plans with them, like a picnic in two days or playing catch in the yard when you come home from work. This will both reassure them that you’ll be back soon and allow for quality time together.

By Dr. James Bender, Psychologist.

Military Medicine’s Commitment to Combatting TBI

Military Medicine’s Commitment to Combatting TBI

The U.S. Navy, Army and Air Force Medical Departments are moving expeditiously with a great sense of urgency to field an unprecedented Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine (MRI) capability for our forces in Afghanistan as part of an overall comprehensive approach to diagnosing and treating concussive injuries on the battlefield despite the claims made recently by USA Today (No MRIs To The Rescue Yet For War-Zone Brain Injuries, USA Today, April 15, 2011).

I and my fellow Surgeons General remain fully supportive of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ initiative to send MRIs to Afghanistan to help our wounded personnel cope with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). We recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan to meet with all the senior military medical and line leadership in the region to discuss the challenges of fielding this capability in depth. This is a complex and unprecedented acquisition issue and we are working hard to push the system to field this equipment as soon as possible while ensuring it will do the job we intend it to do while operating in a combat theater.

By Vice Adm. Adam M. Robinson

Local soldiers give advice to the ones just getting home | NewsFirst5.com | Colorado Springs | Pueblo |

Local soldiers give advice to the ones just getting home | NewsFirst5.com | Colorado Springs | Pueblo |

Local soldiers, looking for ways to deal with their own stress since returning from war, are trying to help soldiers just coming home by giving advice on how make the transition that has been tough for so many.

The Army begins screening soldiers right when they get home to see who needs help. Captain Brett Kelley works with Fort Carson's Transition Command, which has about 700 soldiers who are home and most of whom are medically discharging from the Army.

"We do a pretty good job, but obviously if you have eight-thousand, nine-thousand soldiers coming back you're going to have a lot of issues," says Capt. Kelley.

Families get 'training' for upcoming war deployment

Soldiers in Fort Carson’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, are ready and trained for war in Afghanistan.

Now it’s time to train their families.

The 3,800-soldier brigade will head for combat in June. This week, the brigade worked to let spouses know what to expect during the time apart and who can help them through it.

By: Tom Roeder

Government increases hiring of veterans, but unemployment rate is still high

Veterans made up more than a quarter of new hires by the federal government in the last fiscal year, registering a slight increase since the Obama administration pledged to bring more servicemembers returning to civilian life into the civil service.Office of Personnel Management Director John Berryattributed the progress in the employment of veterans, including those disabled in combat, to an “aggressive” effort to find them good government jobs.

But despite efforts by the private sector and the government, 27 percent of veterans in their early 20s were unemployed in February, while 9 percent of veterans overall are without jobs, several senators and veterans groups said Wednesday as they opened a hearing on Capitol Hill on the high employment barriers veterans face.

By Lisa Rein

Let's Be Heroes to Our Veterans

War is remote from the daily concerns of most Americans. It is not, of course, remote from our troops and veterans. As I write this, our troops are engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, as well as several other places not normally featured in daily headlines. In prosecuting these wars, many if not most of our troops have endured multiple deployments under considerable stress, the stress that comes from confronting danger and enduring discomfort in places and cultures utterly foreign to them.
Operating under severe stress that's exacerbated by cultural dislocation, our troops have made courageous decisions, flawed decisions, and deadly decisions. An aberrant few have become murderers. Such is the great tragedy of all wars: they turn young men into killers.
Even in democracies, even in freedom-loving countries, war twists the best of intentions and pollutes the most honorable of minds. It's a tribute to our military that the vast majority of our troops have tried their hardest to uphold standards of decency that are consistent with American values. For their effort and their sacrifices, they deserve our gratitude.

William J. Astore

Retired lieutenant colonel (USAF

The Struggle for Female Veterans to Transition into Civilian Jobs

A recent article in USA Today by Meena Thiruvengadam brings to light the difficulty female military veterans are facing after leaving the armed forces and trying to find civilian jobs.

While women outside the military are bouncing back from the recession and encountering less unemployment than men, female military veterans “are increasingly battling homelessness and unemployment.” In fact, female military veterans are now twice as likely to become homeless than women who never served in the military. Why is this happening?

http://blogs.forbes.com/lisaquast/

Mental Health Screening and Coordination of Care for Soldiers Deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan

Mental health screening of soldiers prior to deployment to a theater of war was first attempted by the U.S. Army in World War I in the hope of avoiding the high rates of psychiatric casualties observed in British and French troops, but it did not prevent extensive disability from shell shock in American World War I veterans (1). In World War II, the U.S. military carried out mass neuropsychiatric screening with the aim of identifying individuals who might be psychologically vulnerable to later psychiatric breakdown in the combat environment because of, for example, neuroses or minor personality defects (1). In World War II, as in later wars, predeployment screening to predict the development of future mental disorders was a failure for a variety of reasons, including imprecise screening methods and instruments, poor interrater reliability, high false positive rates, low thresholds for caseness that did not discern significant severity, and low predictive power

Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks, M.D., M.R.C.Psych.

Michelle Obama previews--a bit--Tuesday launch of her military family initiative. Transcript

WASHINGTON--First Lady Michelle Obama's team has been planning for months the launch of her stepped-up drive to help military families; a major rollout is set for Tuesday at the White House. On Thursday, speaking at a "military child of the year" event in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Mrs. Obama said forging public, private and non-profit partnerships are a centerpiece of the program.
"...for the past two years, I've traveled this country meeting with military families and working to raise awareness of the incredible contributions that these families are making, and it's why next week Jill Biden and I are launching a new nationwide campaign calling on every single American to honor, recognize, and support our military families. And our message is very clear: It's that every American has the ability -- and the obligation -- to give something back to our military families," Mrs. Obama said.

"Everybody can do something. Schools can work to better meet the needs of military kids. Businesses can make an effort to hire military spouses. Ordinary citizens can do something as simple as offering to shovel the snow, babysit, organize events in their communities to celebrate these families.

By Lynn Sweet

MOMC: Real Warriors Celebrating Military Children

The Real Warriors Campaign is celebrating the Month of the Military Child with a comprehensive list of opportunities that service members and their loved ones across the nation can partake in. A variety of these activities not only promote togetherness, but also family resilience and readiness.

Activities range from letter-writing, crafts, scrapbooking, and story/activity books specifically designed for military children. Some activities are available for no-cost download on the site.

More importantly, the site offers resources for service members on how to communicate with their children about deployment, and offers online resources as well as some tips for real-life guidance both through the Real Warriors Campaign and DCoE’s Health Center.

by Jian DeLeon

Military Children Deserve Nation’s Gratitude

WASHINGTON, April 1, 2011 – Military children continually rise to the challenges of military life and deserve the nation’s gratitude for doing so, a Defense Department official said today.
“We applaud their character and maturity, and we acknowledge that kids serve too,” Robert L. Gordon III, deputy assistant secretary of defense for military community and family policy, wrote in a blog today titled “Month of the Military Child: Kids Serve Too.”
Each April, Americans pause to recognize the contributions and sacrifices of the nation’s 1.8 million military children and youth during Month of the Military Child.
“It’s a life of frequent moves, changing schools, leaving friends and making new friends,” Gordon wrote.
Gordon highlighted a few of the Defense Department’s programs intended to support military families and children.
The department, for example, is working with state officials to develop the Interstate Compact on Educational Opportunity for Military Children, Gordon said, which is designed to ease school transitions and to support children through deployments. The compact provides common guidelines for participating states to follow in handling issues such as enrollment age, records transfer and graduation requirements.

By Elaine Sanchez

Rx for Combat Stress: Comradeship

GARMSIR, Afghanistan—The morning after Chad Wade died, nobody wanted to walk point.

The Marines in Cpl. Wade's squad no longer had to imagine what would happen if they stepped on a buried bomb. Now they had seen it, and the fresh memory of their friend's shattered legs froze them in place.

When their squad leader, Sgt. Albert Tippett, lined them up for their next patrol, no one would pick up the metal detector used by the point man to clear a path through the mines.

It was, Sgt. Tippett knew, the moment his men would either keep fighting or succumb to fear and loss. So he handed the metal detector to the man who was hurting most: Cpl. Wade's best friend.

That moment, and those that followed, epitomize the new approach to combat stress that the Marine Corps wants to institutionalize. Faced with a wave of mental-health problems among returning troops, the Corps is training young Marines—down to corporals and sergeants—to sniff out combat stress among their peers on the front lines and tackle it directly on the field of battle.

"The closer they are to their buddies, and the company they trained and deployed with, the better chance you have of returning them to combat," says Col. David Furness, commander of 1st Marine Regiment.

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS

UT study helps identify soldiers more at risk for PTSD

University of Texas researchers have discovered that soldiers who quickly look away from fearful images are more vulnerable to developing post-traumatic stress disorder, a finding that could lead to better training and preparation for service members before they go off to war.

The study, which evaluated Fort Hood soldiers before, during and after a deployment to Iraq, also found that soldiers who fixated on sad images were more susceptible to depression.

An estimated 20 percent of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan return with PTSD or major depression, and researchers say their findings could help the U.S. military develop prevention programs to help soldiers cope with the stresses of war.

The costs of combat-related PTSD are high. Service members can suffer from flashbacks, emotional detachment, nightmares and difficulties maintaining relationships, sometimes for years. A 2008 Rand Corp. study estimated that in the two years after deployment, the cost of treating PTSD or major depression in service members, coupled with the value of their lost productivity, was more than $6 billion.

By Jeremy Schwartz

Defense contractors make hiring veterans a priority

A former Marine, Ayres had suffered severe injuries in Fallujah: A rocket-propelled grenade inflicted nerve damage, burns, partial blindness and traumatic brain injury. Ayres, who also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, worked with military recruiting firms, but they didn’t seem to understand how to handle his atypical rsum.

But Ayres impressed a Northrop Grumman executive with a speech he gave on Capitol Hill, and, through a Northrop program geared toward hiring severely wounded veterans, Ayres was brought on as a subject matter expert in the firm’s health information technology group.

Operation IMPACT, as the Northrop program is called, has hired about 85 veterans since its inception in 2004, most of them within the last three years. It’s among multiple veteran-focused hiring initiatives run by area defense contractors who say they want to support former service members and access the skills and values taught in the military. Though the programs represent only a small portion of the contractors’ hiring, the efforts appear to be growing

By Marjorie Censer

Fighting to ensure veterans get jobs

The current operation in Libya is a reminder that American heroes are serving with courage and skill in every corner of the world.

As members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, we visit with our servicemen and -women regularly – in North Carolina and Massachusetts, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are committed to working across party lines to ensure that our troops are treated with the dignity they have earned. Not just while they wear the uniform, but when they return stateside and throughout their lives.

By SEN. KAY HAGAN & SEN. SCOTT BROWN 

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/52265.html#ixzz1IIR5FNq7

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/52265.html#ixzz1IIQsQteU