Analysis of cortical thickness in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder due to mining disaster

MRI studies in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have focused primarily on manually-based hippocampal volumetry. However, the variation in cortical thickness and the relationship between the cortical volume and thickness alteration has not been well investigated in PTSD. In this paper, Laplacian method was first utilized to estimate cortical thickness after automatic segmentation of grey matter from MR images. Then the thickness maps were analyzed by SPM5, as well as volumetric analysis. Comparison between 15 survivors of mining disaster with PTSD and 10 survivors without PTSD, from the same accident, indicates that in the superior frontal gyrus and cuneus, the cortical thickness of survivors with PTSD is significantly larger than those without PTSD. However, local reduction in cortical volume is observed in hippocampus, which suggests indirect relationship between the two kinds of structural alterations.