Help with neuroscience

[spark]

Hi folks!

 

I'm new to neuroscience and this forum and was hoping to get some help from people who know a lot more on this topic than I do.

 

I have a friend of mine who had a paper published earlier this year about some stuff he's working on regarding MRIs and PTSD. The link to it is as below:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925492715000037

 

I'd like some help with understanding what this is about. My friend explained it to be briefly but it didn't sink in and I'm too embarrassed to ask him again and seem stupid.

 

Whatever help that you can provide would be very much appreciated. Thanks

 

Also as a side thing, what do you think of the paper? Any good?

Edited October 19, 2015 by spark

[hypervalent_iodine]

Have you read the paper yourself? It might be more constructive to begin with what you specifically don't understand. For instance, are you familiar with what a meta-analysis is?

[iNow]

^HV is correct. More specific questions would be helpful.

 

On quick glance, it appears that your friend was looking to see if there were measurable brain differences in people with PTSD versus two other groups: neurotypicals (the baseline group with no known brain injuries / healthy controls) and traumatized controls (folks who have experienced trauma but don't seem to display PTSD symptoms).

 

To do this, he looked over 44 different articles published by other researchers to see if there were any noticeable trends in their findings when using MRI machines to measure. Specifically, he looked at three specific brain regions: the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the anterior cingulate (it may be useful to google those terms and go from there). It appears he chose these regions in an attempt to explain the common symptoms of PTSD like difficulty concentrating, maintaining attention, and managing emotions.

 

He found that two of the three areas were, in fact, generally smaller in folks with PTSD, but he also noted that drawing any broader conclusions was difficult since the folks with PTSD were so varied and had a lot of differences from one another (they weren't some homogeneous monolithic block).

[spark]

Hi hypervalent_iodine & iNow.

 

Thanks for your responses and your help.

 

I have read the paper in that I started to but I was lost very quickly in what it was about. I'm not familiar with meta-analysis but Googling since saw that it's a study of studies...?

 

What I was after I think was what iNow had stated. Just wanted to get a sense of it. I don't expect to hold a detailed discussion. Just wanted to know what it was generally about.

 

So in short, my friend did a study of a bunch of other people's studies and saw that some parts of the brain were smaller for PTSD suffers but isn't enough information to definitely be sure that the smaller brain parts cause PTSD? Is that right? I'll look to do a search on those brain parts but are the parts of the brain affected important with regards to PTSD?

[Function]

A bit more off-topic than my fellow users here; if you'd like to learn about neuroscience a lot, I can reccomend a very good book, written by (among others) Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel (2000), which I bought after a strong personal reccomendation from my professor of physiology, stating that this would be the absolute principal, the best book on basic neuroscience:

 

Principles of Neural Science, 5th Edition

Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell, Steven A. Spiegelbaum, A. J. Hudspeth

ISBN 978-0-07-139011-8

 

I'm a second year undergraduate student of medicine (BSc), having a course of 11 ECTS (in 1 year, one takes up 60 ECTS points, "study credit") named "Nervous system and senses" and I use this book a lot to clarify things from my syllabus that aren't clear or to deepen my knowlegde on the CNS, since I'd very much like to specialize in neurology or -sugery later. The book hasn't failed once in clarifying something, in contrary to Ganong's Review of Medical Physiology

Edited October 25, 2015 by Function