In a wave of ignorance, famed horror novelist Stephen King inserted foot in mouth:

I don’t want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don’t, then you’ve got, the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that. It’s, it’s not as bright. So, that’s my little commercial for that.

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Sorry, Stephen. Joining the Army and going to Iraq isn’t necessarily the fate of retarded monkeys. This holder of a B.A. English and Iraq veteran proves otherwise. That’s my public service ad to you.

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PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a topic that sits in the forefront of most veteran’s minds and can affect our lives from minor nuisance, to debilitating condition. Of course, it’s not only a veteran’s issue. Statistics show that over a quarter of a million Americans will develop PTSD in the course of their lives. Not surprisingly the biggest groups are war vets and those who live in high-crime areas.

Studies being conducted now into biological factors that could contribute to PTSD show that there are specific genes that influence how a person may respond to a traumatic event. And not only that, but events in childhood can even cause changes in the genes themselves, for better or worse.

Researchers found that specific variations in a stress-related gene appeared to be influenced by trauma at a young age — in this case child abuse. That interaction strongly increased the chances for adult survivors of abuse to develop signs of PTSD.

Among adult survivors of severe child abuse, those with the specific gene variations scored more than twice as high (31) on a scale of post-traumatic stress, compared with those without the variations (13).

The worse the abuse, the stronger the risk in people with those gene variations.

The study of 900 adults is among the first to show that genes can be influenced by outside, non genetic factors to trigger signs of PTSD. It is the largest of just two reports to show molecular evidence of a genetic influence on PTSD.

Basically, past traumas can cause genetic predispositions to bad reactions to new traumas.

One has to wonder what this could mean for the future, both in treating those with PTSD, and perhaps preventing genetic factors that could lead to PTSD. As the science and technology become available, could it be possible to designate those at high risk before they go through a trauma, treat them, and prevent the reaction that could devastate their lives? Perhaps, but by that same token, could that be removing a genuine factor in our very humanity, the toll that some of the world’s hard realities can take on our souls?

No matter what comes of these studies, it’s important to remember the scars that we all carry- physical, and emotional- and acknowledge the roll they play in our lives.

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