New UAMS Study Seeks to Help Abused Adolescent Girls
By: KARK 4 News
Updated: July 11, 2012
A new study at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock seeks to help abused adolescent girls.
A UAMS researcher with the Psychiatric Research Institute has received $405,000 for a two-year brain imaging study that will help target mental health treatments.
During the study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health, 45 girls ages 11-16 will receive brain scans before and after a widely used 12-week course of behavioral therapy.
Abused girls are a focus of the study because they are about twice as likely as abused boys to have persistent mental distress, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, said Joshua Cisler, Ph.D., the study's principal investigator. The standard behavioral therapy (Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is effective in about two-thirds of girls.
The study will identify patterns within the brain that are associated with each girl's response to the behavioral therapy.
"What we want to know is before we give an abused child this treatment, can we determine whether or not that child is going to respond to it," Cisler said. "If the child is in that one-third that doesn't respond to the therapy, then let's consider alternative treatments."
"Only about two out of three girls will respond to it. So if we treat a 100 girls with PTSD with this study, we know 33 of them are not gonna get better," he says.
Although understanding what's happening in the brain is not by itself a solution to the problem, he said it will suggest new, exciting ways to address the problem.
Cisler will use a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device at the Psychiatric Research Institute. Such devices are relatively new and can measure small changes in neural functioning in the brain.
The NIH award, he said, was made possible by the UAMS Translational Research Institute, which provided $20,000 to enable his compilation of pilot data for the NIH application.
A UAMS researcher with the Psychiatric Research Institute has received $405,000 for a two-year brain imaging study that will help target mental health treatments.
During the study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health, 45 girls ages 11-16 will receive brain scans before and after a widely used 12-week course of behavioral therapy.
Abused girls are a focus of the study because they are about twice as likely as abused boys to have persistent mental distress, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, said Joshua Cisler, Ph.D., the study's principal investigator. The standard behavioral therapy (Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is effective in about two-thirds of girls.
The study will identify patterns within the brain that are associated with each girl's response to the behavioral therapy.
"What we want to know is before we give an abused child this treatment, can we determine whether or not that child is going to respond to it," Cisler said. "If the child is in that one-third that doesn't respond to the therapy, then let's consider alternative treatments."
"Only about two out of three girls will respond to it. So if we treat a 100 girls with PTSD with this study, we know 33 of them are not gonna get better," he says.
Although understanding what's happening in the brain is not by itself a solution to the problem, he said it will suggest new, exciting ways to address the problem.
Cisler will use a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device at the Psychiatric Research Institute. Such devices are relatively new and can measure small changes in neural functioning in the brain.
The NIH award, he said, was made possible by the UAMS Translational Research Institute, which provided $20,000 to enable his compilation of pilot data for the NIH application.
