Social support modulates the association between PTSD diagnosis and medial frontal volume in Chinese adults who lost their only child.

ABSTRACT: Losing an only child is a devastating life event that a parent can experience and may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Social support could buffer against the negative influence of this trauma, but the neural mechanism underlying this alleviation effect remains poorly understood. In this study, voxel-based morphometry was conducted on brain MRI of 220 Han Chinese adults who had lost their only child. We performed multiple regression analysis to investigate the associations between social support scores - along with PTSD diagnosis, age, sex, body mass index (BMI) - and brain grey matter (GM) volumes in these bereaved parents. For all trauma-exposed adults, social support-by-diagnosis interaction was significantly associated with medial prefrontal volume (multiple comparisons c

SUBMITTER: Qi R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7256056 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature