McGlinchey Regina E, Fortier Catherine B, Venne Jonathan R, Maksimovskiy Arkadiy L, Milberg William P
Geriatric Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) and the Translational Research Center for TBI and Stress-related Disorders (TRACTS), Boston, MA 02130, USA.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2014 Mar 12;11(3):3046-73. doi: 10.3390/ijerph110303046.
This study examined the performance of veterans and active duty personnel who served in Operation Enduring Freedom and/or Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) on a basic associative learning task. Eighty-eight individuals participated in this study. All received a comprehensive clinical evaluation to determine the presence and severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). The eyeblink conditioning task was composed of randomly intermixed delay and trace conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) pairs (acquisition) followed by a series of CS only trials (extinction). Results revealed that those with a clinical diagnosis of PTSD or a diagnosis of PTSD with comorbid mTBI acquired delay and trace conditioned responses (CRs) to levels and at rates similar to a deployed control group, thus suggesting intact basic associative learning. Differential extinction impairment was observed in the two clinical groups. Acquisition of CRs for both delay and trace conditioning, as well as extinction of trace CRs, was associated with alcoholic behavior across all participants. These findings help characterize the learning and memory function of individuals with PTSD and mTBI from OEF/OIF and raise the alarming possibility that the use of alcohol in this group may lead to more significant cognitive dysfunction.
本研究考察了在持久自由行动和/或伊拉克自由行动（OEF/OIF）中服役的退伍军人和现役人员在一项基本联想学习任务中的表现。88人参与了本研究。所有人都接受了全面的临床评估，以确定创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）和创伤性脑损伤（TBI）的存在及严重程度。眨眼条件反射任务由随机混合的延迟和痕迹条件刺激（CS）与非条件刺激（US）配对（习得）组成，随后是一系列仅呈现CS的试验（消退）。结果显示，临床诊断为PTSD或PTSD合并轻度创伤性脑损伤的个体获得延迟和痕迹条件反应（CRs）的水平和速度与部署对照组相似，这表明基本联想学习未受损害。在两个临床组中观察到了不同的消退损伤。所有参与者的延迟和痕迹条件反射的CRs习得以及痕迹CRs的消退都与饮酒行为有关。这些发现有助于刻画来自OEF/OIF的PTSD和轻度创伤性脑损伤个体的学习和记忆功能，并提出了一个令人担忧的可能性，即该群体饮酒可能导致更严重的认知功能障碍。
