Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric condition that has a prevalence of 10-12% in women and is associated with a high rate of lifetime comorbid depression, anxiety, substance use, and cardiovascular disease. The rates of PTSD and comorbidity are substantially higher in urban settings, and African American women are underrepresented in treatment. This proposal adopts a transdisciplinary, translational approach to explore the benefits of a culturally centered, trauma-informed intervention that would enable key insights into improving outcomes among African American women and serve as a model for other health disparity populations. The specific objective of this proposal is to train goal-directed resilience skills and to test program efficacy in increasing engagement, social relatedness, and efficiency of stress responses among 148 African American women in receiving services in urban, primary care settings with clinically significant PTSD symptoms. The scientific premise is that the development of these skills will change mental health and psychophysiological outcomes. Participants will be randomized to intervention and control conditions and will be implemented in 7 Waves. This research effort is guided by 2 specific aims and an exploratory aim:
Aim 1. Quantify the effects of a resilience building intervention on psychological symptoms, cardiovascular risk and resilience outcomes in a group of African American women with clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms.
Aim 2. Determine whether fear, CV physiology, CV risk, and sleep patterns mediate response to a resilience building intervention in a group of African American women with clinically significant posttraumatic stress symptoms.
Aim 3. Identify resource and risk factors in a transdiagnostic, multi- level model of resilience that will examine community and social factors that support individual risk and resilience factors
| Hu, Guoku; Yelamanchili, Sowmya; Kashanchi, Fatah et al. (2017) Proceedings of the 2017 ISEV symposium on ""HIV, NeuroHIV, drug abuse, & EVs"". J Neurovirol 23:935-940 |
