Can young people with PTSD after childhood abuse show weaker heart reactions to threatening words?

Details

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with altered cardiac reactivity to threat cues. Meta-analyses have found that adults with PTSD show increased heart rates in response to trauma-related stimuli. However, the opposite pattern—cardiac hyporeactivity—has recently been reported in subgroups of people with PTSD.

Reports of cardiac alterations in children and adolescents with PTSD are rare and ambiguous. Most studies in adolescents and young adults have been restricted to accident victims, even though PTSD is highly prevalent among victims of child maltreatment. This study aimed to investigate cardiac reactions in adolescents and young adults with PTSD after child abuse.

The study compared cardiac responses to standardized emotional words in 39 adolescent and young adult PTSD patients who had experienced childhood sexual and/or physical abuse and 39 healthy controls; the age range was 15–20 years. The experimental paradigm was a passive reading task using neutral, positive, physically threatening, and socially threatening words, with swear words used as socially threatening stimuli.

Cardiac reactions to negative stimuli, particularly physically threatening stimuli, were less pronounced in the PTSD group than in controls. Cardiac reactions to socially threatening words were also less variable in the PTSD group. For neutral or positive stimuli, there were no differences between or within groups.

The findings suggest that a physiologically blunted subtype of PTSD may already manifest during adolescence and young adulthood. The results also emphasize the relevance of individual trauma history for physiological reactions.