Relief for laboring women may also be key to treating PTSD.

The Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to find a way to help the thousands of soldiers who suffer from Post-traumatic Stress disorder. So far, the best therapies have included long-term counseling and prescription drugs. But for many veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, no combination of the two has been able to relieve their symptoms, which can include nightmares, flashbacks and a general restlessness.

But fresh research from the Naval Medical Center in San Diego has found promising new form of relief, according to the Los Angeles Times, one that countless women would gladly endorse: an epidural. Continue reading »

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Would you zap a painful memory if you could?

We all have images, feelings, and experiences trapped inside our heads that we’d rather let go of.

And a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist is trying to make this a reality, with his work on a drug that could eventually make it possible to erase painful emotional memories.

Its not a sci-fi plot line, it’s based on brain chemistry — Dr. Richard Huganir, the director of Hopkins’ neuroscience department has spent 30 years exploring how memories are formed. Now he thinks he has pinpointed a chemical pathway that provides a target for drugs that could block memories in the first place.  Here’s how it works:

The scientists focused in on a protein, called calcium-permeable AMPARs, that hangs around for two days after a person experiences a painful emotional event.

To test the protein’s effect on memory, they induced bad experiences in mice by exposing two groups of the rodents to an electric shock while playing a particular sound. One group got a dose of the protein, the other group did not. The ones who had the high levels of the AMPAR protein in their brains held on to the memory of the shock for much longer and kept reacting fearfully to the sound.  The other mice let it go. Continue reading »

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Normal life on the outside?

Some of the 33 Chilean miners are already set to leave the hospital and, by all accounts, the whole group is in good condition. The last of the men were rescued yesterday.

A clean bill of health and what might feel like a second chance at life — in a way it’s only up from here. Families have been reunited, weddings planed, a father met his baby for the first time.

But it’s so unprecedented. The whole thing is like one big medical and psychological experiment (a terrible one), and it’s unclear how life will unfold for these men on the outside. Lots of people reason that being trapped underground for two months is a perfect recipe for PTSD, but I’m not so sure about that. Continue reading »

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Preventing bad birth experiences is about understanding why they happen

Writing for Double X, Henci Goer lists several recent cases of laboring women being mistreated, threatened and/or worse by hospital caretakers. Goer, a nurse, medical writer and author of The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Better Birth, asks why it appears to be OK to strip women of their rights once they’re pregnant. She argues not much has changed since 1959, when the Ladies Home Journal published “Cruelty in the Maternity Ward,” where women talked of the inhumane treatment they suffered in the labor and delivery rooms.

The cases she refers to in her post, many of them covered here at Strollerderby, are, without question, extremes. Is every woman abused by her doctor? Of course not. Are the majority of kids whose moms refuse to sign C-section consent forms whisked off to foster care? No, not even close.

And yet, it’s not hard to find stories of women who felt icky at best, or harmed by their caretakers at worst, during the birth of their kids.

Continue reading »

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When a study identifying about 9 percent of new mothers as having suffered post-traumatic stress disorder came out last year, reaction was predictable. Some people, even my own colleague Hannah Tennant-Morre here at Strollerderby, took issue with the idea that birth was being characterized as a traumatic event, that somehow, as Hannah put it, maternity equates with pathology. But some of us, who’d endured delivery-room experiences that were some of the worst moments of our lives, nodded in recognition.

Now one of those mothers, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, has written a powerful piece for Salon detailing how her son’s nightmarish birth sent her into a tailspin Continue reading »

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Having lost my “ER viriginity” this year, once for each child, I know how stressful a visit to the ER can be. Given that neither of my kids had major, life-threatening conditions and were not admitted, though, for me it was more annoying and day-wrecking than lastingly traumatic, and the same is true of my kids.

For parents whose children experienced a more serious injury, though, the effects can be serious and long-lasting. New research by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia found that one month after a child’s injury, Continue reading »

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The Journal of Pediatric Psychology published a study that found kids with symptoms of post-traumatic stress demonstrated impaired function in their hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory. The study was the first of its kind to use MRIs — functional magnetic resonance imaging – to examine children’s brains, and the findings were consistent with harm seen in the hippocampus of adults in other studies on post-traumatic stress.

Continue reading »

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