What are the long-term effects of traumatic stress?

PTSD can disrupt your entire life: your work, your relationships, your health, and your enjoyment of daily activities. Problems with drug or alcohol use. The numbers related to trauma, which include physical and emotional trauma, are unusually high. In the United States, more than 223 million people have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives.

Digging even deeper, 90% of people who have mental health problems claim to have experienced trauma. Many of our patients report high levels of anxiety that affect every hour they are awake after a traumatic event. While everyone worries from time to time, an anxiety disorder traps you in a mode of running away or fighting that may prevent you from functioning normally. Experiencing high levels of anxiety can lead to widespread inflammation in the body, which can lead to a number of serious health problems, such as cardiovascular or autoimmune diseases.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the result of a traumatic event that can be experienced directly or indirectly. The repeated recollection of traumatic memories is a central component of the phenomenological response to traumatic events. This article explores the evidence on the delayed effects of traumatic stress and its cumulative burden on psychological and physical health. Therefore, late-onset PTSD is intimately related to the fact that people live in a dynamic environment in which traumatic events and other life tensions interact, with the progressive accumulation of risk.

These events can be the same repeated traumatic event or different traumatic events that occur over a close period of time. Traumatic stress causes an alteration of the glucocorticoid system, along with a variety of other neuropeptides, such as corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), beta endorphin, neuropeptide Y and catecholamines. This broader perspective has important implications for the development of treatments that address the underlying dysregulation of cortical excitation and neurohormonal abnormalities after exposure to traumatic stress. This growing body of literature suggests that the effects of traumatic stress should be considered as a major environmental challenge that puts the physical and psychological health of people alike at risk.

Posttraumatic stress disorder is a diagnosis of symptoms that persist for months or years after a traumatic event. The failure of the normal neurotransmitter inhibitory mechanisms that stifle the stress response seems to be important for the individual's distress to develop into a full-fledged post-traumatic or post-traumatic stress disorder or post-event stress disorder. In simple terms, this form of psychotherapy allows people to alleviate the stress and anxiety associated with traumatic memories. The severity of stress experienced before and after traumatic exposure has a significant impact on the incidence and severity of the condition 25.

A unique part of this condition is the repeated reactivation of traumatic memory and the associated stress response, with the subsequent risk of a progressive increase in the individual's reactivity 31. The development of traumatic memories at the time of exposure to stress represents an important vulnerability, since it repeatedly triggers the increasing dysregulation of an individual's neurobiology. The central mechanism is the process of raising awareness to subtle reminders of traumatic memories, as well as exposure to previous and future traumatic events. The progressive onset of symptoms after exposure to traumatic stress is a challenging concept, and late-onset PTSD has long been a controversial notion. .