Neuropsychological assessment of cognitive function in posttramatic stress disorder: a study of Bosnian war veterans

Sammanfattning: The present work assessed cognitive functions, such as attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility, in 20 Bosnian men with combat-related PTSD, acquired during the Balkan war 1992-1996. Veterans with chronic PTSD were tested – 7 years after the end of the hostilities – with a battery consisting of the Sustained Attention to Response Task, the Hayling Sentence Completion Test, the Trail Making Test, the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (verbal part); two questionnaires – Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test and the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale – were also administered. Performance was compared with age- and IQ matched veterans with no PTSD. Study I disclosed pervasive impairments with large effect sizes pertaining to attention, working memory, executive function and memory. Study II documented that PTSD symptom severity is systematically related to neurocognitive deficits and to subjective everyday cognitive problems. Good verbal intellectual ability buffered against the detrimental effect of PTSD on executive cognition. We speculate that, in the present group of combat veterans, PTSD is associated with a dysfunctional higher-level supervisory attentional resource which in turn adversely affect the activity of other lower-level systems concerned with memory and thought.