Cognitive abnormalities and neural mechanisms in post-traumatic stress disorder / 解放军医学杂志

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that develops usually in response to an overwhelmingly terrifying or a life-threatening event.The symptoms including intrusion,flashback,re-experiencing,hyperarousal and avoidance can seriously impair the cognitive functions.At present,the researches have found PTSD patients had the difficulty in retrieving autobiographical memory and narrative disorder,attention bias toward traumatic stimulus and intellectual decline.Decrease in hippocampus and amygdala's volumes,excess endoplasmic reticulum stress,medial prefrontal cortex's low activation and highly excited response of the amygdala to the traumatic stimulus may be the neural mechanisms of cognitive abnormalities.Indepth research on cognitive abnormalities provides directions for PTSD prevention and treatment,and the cognitive treatment by prolonged exposure and attention control may be the effective method.

The neural mechanisms of voluntary control of saccadic eye movements / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

Voluntary control of saccadic eye movements is a kind of saccades controlled by conscious and always used to investigate the brain areas related to saccades and ability of response inhibition and work memory.Researching the neural mechanisms of voluntary control of saccadic eye movements could provide a basis to study the advanced cognitive function of brain and facilitate to explore basic neural mechanisms of abnormal saccadic in brain disorders.As neuroimaging technologies develops,intensive studies about the neural mechanisms of voluntary control of saccadic eye movements have been made great progress.It is showed that several brain areas such as prefrontal cortex,subcortical areas and parietal cortex mainly in participate.These multiple brain regions are involved in voluntary control of saccadic eye movements at different stages.Antisaccades and memory-guided saccades including different brain regions because of their different characteristics of saccadic.The future direction of the research is to combine study with neural imaging technology,and to study more about the brain regions and their functional connectivity involved in voluntary control of saccadic eye movements.