After all, it’s not just our mind that remembers trauma. How does traumatic events affect our body?
A new study, in the magazine prehospital and disaster medicine, sought to investigate three key areas: The autonomous nervous system, the inflammatory immune system and the endocrine system.
The study foundin these Key Biological Systems which remain detectable even when the person reports good psychological well-being. It looks like the Body remembers trauma Even after the mind started to move on.
According to previous investigations, they demonstrated that, in the survivors of terrorism and traumatic events in general, the Body changes. This can be observed in numerous biological markersincluding increased cardiac rhythm, autonomic reactivity and increased salivary cortisol in the afternoon, among others.
A new study was proposed investigate the way trauma affects biological processes through the holding of a retrospective and long -term assessment unprecedented 60 survivors of the Oklahoma City bomber attackwhich took place in 1995.
The study evaluated specific biomarkers and analyzed its comparison between the survivors and the 23 control participants who had not suffered this serious.
These markers included the heart rate reactivity and from blood pressureos Morning Cortisol Levels e and cytokines interleucine 1-β (IL-1β) e Interleucine 2-R (IL-2R).
These cytokines are linked to immune function, With IL-1β to initiate inflammation when the body is sick or injured, while IL-2R activates T cells to combat infections and disease.
The results revealed that the survivors had a higher IL-1β Compared to the control group, but a lower IL-2R. Also had nlower morning of morning cortisolas well as a Diastolic blood pressure at higher rest.
The study also conducted interviews to evaluate the mental health of all participantshaving concluded that the scores of survivors regarding the disturbance of stress posttraumatic and depression were usually low and not significantly different from the control group.
However, the survivors referred to a worse general physical well-beingalthough they are clinically healthy.
Estes Results are interesting because it seems that the body’s response to stress It is not reflected in the self-remedied emotional state of the survivors. For these people, the lasting effects of the traumatic event were more evident in your physiology than in your psychology.
“After having suffered a trauma record their biological systems may no longer be on a typical base line: things have changed,” he said Rachel ZettlCo -author of the study, clinical assistant professor at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavior Sciences at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine.
“It’s not just our minds that remember trauma, Our biological processes also do so. This changes our real physical being. ”
O Study is the first of its genre to exhaustively examine biological responses to stress in the long run in three physiological systems of survivors of the same terrorist event. It also raises new long-term health considerations for extreme trauma survivors, as high IL-1 il is typically observed in people with illness and inflammation, but participants enrolled in the study were clinically healthy.
Teresa Oliveira Campos, Zap //
