Understand your body, and get to know your biochemistry! The link between inflammation, DNA & Trauma

Old or previous Trauma & PTSDs effect on your biochemistry is of great importance as we try to heal, befriend and understand these conditions.  This is a short summary to save you a little time - the original study was published in Journal of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, volume 67, pp. 194-202. 

Previous research had identified the protein CRP, a C-reactive protein, as a major player in our response to inflammation. 

CRP can act like an internal firefighter – it puts out the blaze of inflammation in the central and peripheral nervous system.

And the gene most responsible for producing CRP is AIM2.

So what can cause AIM2 to switch “on”?

Well, stress can be a big factor – and as we know, stress can contribute to inflammation.

But when AIM2 switches on, it also raises CRP levels in the blood to reduce inflammation.

In this study, Miller and the team took blood tests of 288 post-9/11 US military veterans who had experienced traumatic stress during deployment in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

After analyzing their blood samples for CRP levels and doing a clinical assessment of the veterans, the researchers’ findings were two-fold.

They concluded that after traumatic stress, CRP levels are elevated. This means that trauma has an epigenetic influence that turns AIM2“on.” So trauma can lead to inflammation in the body. But CRP helps to reduce that inflammation.

Now here’s the other implication of the researchers’ findings – people who have experienced trauma but have low CRP levels (either due to a failure in epigenetic control of AIM2 or some other genetic mutation) might be at a higher risk for developing PTSD.

While it’s still too early for these findings to have any immediate clinical application, researchers are hopeful that this study is a step forward in identifying how PTSD impacts gene expression and the body.