Knowledge Bank

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic psychiatric disorder associated with notable intrusive cognitive patterns following the experience of a life-threatening stressor. Conventional treatments for PTSD involve prolonged exposure to reminders of trauma and face challenges such as high dropout rates and treatment-refractory cases, causing the present pilot study to investigate the efficacy of an emerging mindfulness-based treatment for PTSD and search for promising biomarkers that may predict positive treatment response. The goal of the present study is to contribute to current efforts seeking to specialize psychiatric treatment through the discovery of positive treatment response predictors, eliminating one-size-fits-all treatment. Participants were 20 individuals who met DSM-5 criteria for PTSD or endorsed experiencing chronic stress. Saliva samples were collected before and after mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) to assess levels of biomarkers, interleukin-6 (IL-6) and dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate (DHEA-S). Analyses revealed significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity following the MBCT intervention, as well as respective positive correlations between IL-6 levels and pre-intervention CAPS-5 scores and DHEA-S levels and post-intervention CAPS-5 scores. These findings suggest complex biomarker responses to PTSD symptom reduction, allowing us to speculate about how we define resilience and success in treatment. Furthermore, the results of the present study may illuminate physiological pathways of action used by MBCT to reduce intrusive cognitive patterns. Future studies examining the neurobiological mechanisms of trauma-focused MBCT with additional biomarker collection time points throughout treatment will be indispensable to understanding how mindfulness-based therapy skills improve symptoms phenotypically and biologically and whether these coping strategies work for all subsets of patients.