Trilateral Project

Victims of War: Contribution of the Cholinergic System to the Development of PTSD in Children and Adolescents in Palestine and Israel

funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Project leader: Prof. Clemens Kirschbaum in collaboration with Prof. Alon Friedman, Prof. Hermona Soreq (Israel) and Prof. Mohammed A. M. Shaheen (Palestine)

War conditions entail chronic and sometimes severe stress on civil populations. While numerous studies have described the clinical presentation and morbidity associated with prolonged stress conditions, the physiological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying stress-related illnesses are yet incompletely understood. Furthermore, to date there are neither means for early identification of individuals at particular risk nor for implementation of prevention strategies for avoiding the development of stress-related illnesses. This trilateral collaborative research aims to initiate the development of such means by exploring the stress response in specific populations under prolonged, severe war stress. A multimodal approach will be implemented, integrating peripheral changes observed in genetic, molecular and biochemical-endocrinological measures with central nervous system changes detected by brain imaging and electrophysiological recordings. Yet more specifically, it is focused on those key transcriptional changes, which take place in the cholinergic system under stress and that are critically involved in implementing stress-related network changes and brain dysfunction.