Tales of Traumatic Stress in High-Risk Populations in the Global South: From Epidemiological to Genomic and Epigenomic Insights

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• Professor Soraya Seedat, Executive Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Stellenbosch University.
• Friday 25 October 2024, 16:30-18:00
• Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sara Seddon.

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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the quintessential disorder following high-violence exposure in low-resource contexts where timely diagnosis and equitable access to evidence-based treatments are often lacking. While its genesis is multifactorial, its presentation complex, and often layered by concurrent mental and physical health conditions, much progress has been made in identifying many of the underlying bio-behavioural and environmental mechanisms, and the influence of cultural factors, in conferring relative risk or resilience, and in developing and

maintaining PTSD . However, the vast majority of molecular and bio-mechanistic studies in PTSD have been undertaken in high-income countries, as well as outside the African continent, thus the current knowledge-base is far from being reflective of the global burden of the disorder. This presentation, with a focus on South Africa, will elucidate the epidemiology of trauma and the impact of childhood trauma in particular, in various high-risk samples, and the array of biological markers that have been identified and implicated in aberrant stress response processes in PTSD including genotypic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, endocrinological and immune markers, as well as sex-based contributors. I will argue that studies from diverse low-and middle-income country populations can contribute important epidemiological and biological insights.

This talk is part of the Zangwill Club series.

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