Stress and Emotional Memory
Condition: Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
MeSH terms: Stress Disorders, Traumatic; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
Study type: Interventional

Summary: 
      A broad group of disorders is associated with severe stress existence in children or
      adolescents. The most characteristic result, and one of the most serious being the state of
      post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whose main source consists of physical or sexual
      violence, and to a lesser extent, accidents public road or natural disaster, whose child was
      the subject or witness. PTSD is associated with a deleterious effect on cognition and
      including the mnemonic operation. The painful reminder of the traumatic event is one of the
      most disabling symptoms. However, there are many other memory disorders that experimental
      studies gradually update. They maintain a close link with emotional regulation that disturbed
      you know if PTSD. However the majority of studies on emotion and cognition and their
      relationship with brain activity took adult subject. Work in adolescents are few on the
      morphological study, on rare neurobehavioral and reduced to two studies of functional
      neuroimaging. Contrary to what is observed in adults, morphological studies report
      consistently, no reduction in hippocampal volume. There is no study in the idle state. Two
      studies in functional MRI, the first highlighted in PTSD patients inhibition of the activity
      of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to stimuli such as to evoke the trauma, a second
      reported increased activity in the prefrontal cortex Median (mPFC) in a inhibition. The
      objective task of our study is to evaluate the impact of psychological trauma on brain
      structures involved in the emotional component of the memory (amygdala, hippocampus,
      prefrontal cortex in particular). For this, the investigators will take in 33 adolescents,
      including patients with posttraumatic symptomatology and matched controls free of trauma age,
      several neuroimaging exams, anatomical and functional. The functional review will include
      some rest and another in activation during episodic memory task designed to assess the
      influence of self-perception on memory impairment observed in patients. The investigators
      will check, for each group of patients and controls, the involvement of cortical structures
      in relation to the regulation of emotional memory (CCA, amygdala and hippocampus). The
      anatomy of the hippocampus benefit specific imaging methods developed in the unit INSERM
      U923. Endocrine correlates of stress tests will be studied by a fully-traumatic by salivary
      cortisol sampling.

      This research will clarify the mechanisms involved in emotional and memory impairments
      secondary to psychological trauma, their relationship with self (judgment and self-esteem)
      and studying their morphological substrates. A longer-term goal is to offer help in the
      diagnosis and monitoring of young patients with posttraumatic symptomatology.
    


Intervention name(s): MRI
Intervention type(s): Other
Allocation: Non-Randomized
Intervention model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary purpose: Diagnostic