Biomarker Study

Added: Aug 09, 2017 9:42 am

Provide a report of 22 confounding issues for each participant, showing the ID numbers of the PTSD cases and controls for the entire set of persons participating the study (350 total).  Twenty-two confounding issues have been listed to date.  Therefore, 22 individual sets of information will need to be determined from each of the 350 persons.  This information is critical  to be able to determine if the panels of biomarkers USACEHR has selected continue to identify PTSD if the individual are taking specific medicines, if they are being treated for depression or other co-morbidities, in the presence of alcoholism, etc.  Additionally, USACEHR is asking whether some of the confounding factors (such as inflammatory markers) to separate subgroups of individuals.  Such stratification into subtypes of PTSD will enable us to obtain a better success rate for the identification of persons with PTSD and have potential to provide a ‘personalized’ approach for therapeutic strategies. 

For the past 5 years, the consortium for Systems Biology of PTSD, has collaborated to carry out studies to determine a panel of measurements which will objectively identify PTSD.

This report is urgently needed in order to test the current panels of molecular indicators.  It will involve going through each file of the 350 persons in these various cohorts to determine which of the 22 overarching confounders is/is not present.  The records which will be searched include notes from the oral psychiatric interview, each of the self-report tests addressing depression (Beck Depression Index), sleep quality (Pittsburgh sleep quality index), general symptoms (Symptoms checklist -90) and some 6 other detailed information report tools which form a basis of the analysis.