The Munich PTSD Biomarker Study (MPBS)

• Published in: Pharmacopsychiatry
• Main Authors: Schmidt, U, Gall-Kleebach, D, Pfister, H, Czesny, N, Spoormaker, VI, Rein, T, Uhr, M, Bettecken, T, Holsboer, F, Ising, M
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: 01.09.2009
• ISSN: 0176-3679; 1439-0795
• DOI: 10.1055/s-0029-1240218

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common and debilitating psychiatric disease. Estimates of the prevalence of PTSD in populations experiencing potentially traumatic events range from 1% to 15% for current PTSD and 10% to 39% for lifetime PTSD indicating that although a substantial amount of individuals exposed to a traumatic event develops PTSD, most of these individuals do not. Besides the severity of trauma and the extent of peritraumatic social support, inborn or acquired constitutional factors could explain why PTSD afflicts only a certain proportion of persons who encountered a potentially traumatic incident. Latter assumption fueled the performance of several genetic association studies in patients and animal models that revealed a set of interesting candidate genes mostly linked to either the fields of neurotransmission, neurode-/regeneration or HPA-axis modulation. Nevertheless, some of these trials achieved conflicting findings possibly resulting from confounding variables like co-morbidity, type of trauma and, supposedly, yet unknown non – genomic constitutional variables. These discrepancies demand the need for further and more comprehensive clinical research trials hopefully contributing to the improvement, ideally the personalization, of current therapeutic options. Here we present the conceptual design of the Munich PTSD Biomarker Research Study, a clinical research trial started in March 2009at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. This study was supported by Horst Kübler Stiftung