Gray matter differences in adults and children with posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of 113 studies and 11 meta-analyses

Abstract

Background: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of gray matter alterations of adult- and underage patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in comparison to healthy trauma-exposed (TC) and non-exposed (HC) individuals.

Methods: We subdivided our groups into patients with PTSD after trauma exposure in adulthood (aa) or childhood (ac) as well as children with PTSD (cc). We identified 113 studies, including 6.800 participants in our review, which we divided into studies focusing on whole-brain and region-of-interest (ROI) analysis. We performed a coordinate-based meta-analysis on 14 studies in the group of aa-PTSD.

Results: We and found lower gray matter volume in patients with PTSD (aa) in the medial frontal gyrus (PTSD<HC/TC) and Culmen/posterior cingulate cortex (PTSD<TC). Results from ROI-based studies mainly show alterations for patients with PTSD in the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, corpus callosum, and amygdala.

Limitations: Due to a limited number of studies reporting whole-brain results, the meta-analyses could only be performed in one subgroup and within this subgroup for a limited number of studies.

Conclusions: Our results are in line with psychobiological models of PTSD that associate the identified regions with brain circuits involved in context processing, threat detection and emotion regulation.

Keywords: Gray matter; Meta-analysis; Posttraumatic stress disorder; Stress; Trauma.