Quick relief of PTSD anxiety

Jason Brown’s return home from a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq should have been happier. But there were nightmares, tension, the constant feeling of being on edge.

"I’d see things out of the corner of my eye, I’d see shadows," says the 29-year-old Army reservist, an engineering technician, who came home to Peoria in July 2007. "I’d be suspicious of things; they were out of place. I didn’t sleep well."

He was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, an all-too-common issue among returning military personnel, but one that’s not often acknowledged. PTSD can result in nightmares, sleeplessness, restlessness, anger, or an inability to trust others.

It can be triggered by any number of traumatic events, such as sexual or physical abuse, a violent crime, a dangerous event such as tornado or fire, or war.

Estimates of how many veterans suffer from PTSD range as high as 50 percent. What’s not disputed is that most of them are undiagnosed. Dr. Eugene Lipov refers to the growing problem as "the reverse surge."

Lipov is the president and medical director of Advanced Pain Centers, with offices in Hoffman Estates and Westmont. He believes he has found a way to combat the feelings that come with PTSD through a seemingly simple injection that calms the section of the brain that becomes overactive in PTSD patients.

The treatment is called a stellate ganglion block, an injection of the local anesthetic bupivacaine around a group of nerves in the neck.

"The medication we’re using is the same numbing medication that has been used for decades for pregnant women during labor and delivery," explains Dr. Jay Joshi, director of research at Advanced Pain Centers.

But using it against PTSD is a new idea. Lipov made another connection between the medication and the body’s reaction.

"I found that one part of the brain that works on hot flashes and PTSD is the same … the insular cortex," he explains. The injection, he says, "reboots" the insular cortex.

"It resets the nerve system the way God built it," he says.

Little, who is designing the clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of the procedure, points out that the injection is not a treatment for PTSD; "it’s a treatment for anxiety that comes out of PTSD."

So far, five patients have been treated. The first was the victim of an armed robbery, and a paper on the case will be published in the September issue of the Annals of Clinical Psychiatry.

The procedure itself takes only 5 or 10 minutes. One of its biggest benefits it that it works immediately, unlike antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy, the most commonly used treatments, which may not take effect for months.

Brown’s first injection was about two months ago.

"It had an immediate effect," he says. "I noticed I wasn’t tense, I wasn’t looking around. I was just calm."

"His sleeping was definitely better [after the first treatment">," agrees his wife, Amanda, whom he married two days before he left for Iraq. "He didn’t have as many nightmares."

The treatments do need to be repeated, though Lipov and Little say the time between them appears to get longer.

Brown returned for a second treatment at the end of July after he noticed some symptoms returning, thought to be triggered by 4th of July fireworks.

The hope is that eventually a large clinical trial would encompass 1,000 patients. Before that, though, Lipov is trying to raise the funds to continue current treatments (go to stopptsdnow.com for more information).

"Once we do the [large"> study," Little says, "it opens the door for it to be a clinical tool to be used in VA hospitals."

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