Diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in One Minute

Scientists have developed a one-minute test that can effectively diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder.

Apostolos Georgopoulos, at the University of Minnesota in the US, and colleagues developed the synchronous neural interactions (SNI) that appears to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with an accuracy of 90 per cent.

"The excellent results obtained offer major promise for the usefulness of the SNI test for differential diagnosis as well as for monitoring disease progression and for evaluating the effects of psychological and/or drug treatment," the BBC quoted the team as saying.

Rajendra Morey of Duke University, a researcher into the neurological basis of PTSD and other disorders, added that the SNI approach "has a lot of merit" in the formal study of brain disorders.

Dr Neil Greenberg, a researcher in military psychiatry at King's College London, however, cast a shadow of doubt, saying a clinical test of this sort may not help address the principal challenge in diagnosis.

He said: "The main challenge with PTSD - with the military, emergency services, or journalists - isn't diagnosing it. It's with getting people who might have the condition to come forward and have an assessment and treatment.

"If someone could go out and point a device at a hundred people and tell which of them would actually benefit from treatment but aren't going to come forward and get help, that would be useful."

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The findings were published in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Source-ANI
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