Brain Environment Interactions: Stress, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and the Need for a Postmortem Brain Collection.

Stress, especially the extreme stress of traumatic events, can alter both neurobiology and behavior. Such extreme environmental situations provide a useful model for understanding environmental influences on human biology and behavior. This paper will review some of the evidence of brain alterations that occur with exposure to environmental stress.

Evaluation of a family-centered prevention intervention for military children and families facing wartime deployments.

Objectives: We evaluated the Families OverComing Under Stress program, which provides resiliency training designed to enhance family psychological health in US military families affected by combat- and deployment-related stress.

Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of Families OverComing Under Stress program evaluation data that was collected between July 2008 and February 2010 at 11 military installations in the United States and Japan. We present data at baseline for 488 unique families (742 parents and 873 children) and pre-post outcomes for 331 families.

Family-centered preventive intervention for military families: implications for implementation science.

In this paper, we report on the development and dissemination of a preventive intervention, Families OverComing Under Stress (FOCUS), an eight-session family-centered intervention for families facing the impact of wartime deployments. Specific attention is given to the challenges of rapidly deploying a prevention program across diverse sites, as well as to key elements of implementation success. FOCUS, developed by a UCLA-Harvard team, was disseminated through a large-scale demonstration project funded by the United States Bureau of Navy Medicine and Surgery (BUMED) beginning in 2008 at 7 installations and expanding to 14 installations by 2010.

Families overcoming under stress: implementing family-centered prevention for military families facing wartime deployments and combat operational stress.

The toll of multiple and prolonged deployments on families has become clearer in recent years as military families have seen an increase in childhood anxiety, parental psychological distress, and marital discord. Families overcoming under stress (FOCUS), a family-centered evidence-informed resiliency training program developed at University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard Medical School, is being implemented at military installations through an initiative from Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. The research foundation for FOCUS includes evidence-based preventive interventions that were adapted to meet the specific needs of military families facing combat operational stress associated with wartime deployments.

Autonomic activation during sleep in posttraumatic stress disorder and panic: a mattress actigraphic study.

Background: While it has been reported that persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) manifest tonic autonomic activation, the literature contains numerous counterexamples. In revisiting the question, this study employed a novel method of mattress actigraphy to unobtrusively estimate heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia over multiple nights of sleep in the home.

Methods: Sleep cardiac autonomic status was estimated in four diagnostic groups, posttraumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, persons comorbid for both conditions, and control subjects.