Cortical morphological changes and associated transcriptional signatures in post-traumatic stress disorder and psychological resilience.

BACKGROUND

Individuals who have experienced severe traumatic events are estimated to have a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prevalence rate ranging from 10 to 50%, while those not affected by trauma exposure are often considered to possess psychological resilience. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the development of PTSD, especially resilience after trauma, remain unclear. This study aims to investigate changes of cortical morphometric similarity network (MSN) in PTSD and trauma-exposed healthy individuals (TEHI), as well as the associated molecular alterations in gene expression, providing potential targets for the prevention and intervention of PTSD.

METHODS

We recruited PTSD patients and TEHI who had experienced severe earthquakes, and healthy controls who had not experienced earthquakes. We identified alterations in the whole-brain MSN changes in PTSD and TEHI, and established associations between these changes and brain-wide gene expression patterns from the Allen Human Brain Atlas microarray dataset using partial least squares regression.

RESULTS

At the neuroimaging level, we found not only trauma-susceptible changes in TEHI same as those in PTSD, but also unique neurobiological alterations to counteract the deleterious impact of severe trauma. We identified 1444 and 2214 genes transcriptionally related to MSN changes in PTSD and TEHI, respectively. Functional enrichment analysis of weighted gene expression for PTSD and TEHI revealed distinct enrichments in Gene Ontology biological processes and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways. Furthermore, gene expression profiles of astrocytes, excitatory neurons, and microglial cells are highly related to MSN abnormalities in PTSD.

CONCLUSIONS

The formation of resilience may be by an active compensatory process of the brain. The combination of macroscopic neuroimaging changes and microscopic human brain transcriptomics could offer a more direct and in-depth understanding of the pathogenesis of PTSD and psychological resilience, shedding light on new targets for the prevention and treatment of PTSD.