PTSD and Military Health Research

Randomized trials, biomarker analysis, and mediation methods for PTSD, blast injury, and veteran health

2026-06-07 18:16 PDT

Overview

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and blast-related injury represent major unmet clinical needs in veteran populations, with substantial overlap between PTSD symptomatology and the neurological sequelae of blast exposure. This program supports statistical analysis of randomized trials testing prazosin – an alpha-1 adrenergic antagonist with evidence for PTSD nightmares and post-traumatic headache – as well as causal mediation analysis of PTSD comorbidities and biomarker trajectory analysis in blast-exposed cohorts.

The program operates in close collaboration with investigators at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and draws on data from the VA Cooperative Studies Program (CSP-563) and investigator-initiated trials.

Papers in development

  • Reanalysis of the VA Cooperative Studies Program prazosin PTSD trial using contemporary mixed-model methods.

  • Primary longitudinal analysis of a prazosin randomized controlled trial for post-traumatic headache in veterans.

  • Plasma GFAP biomarker trajectories in blast-exposed veterans: parametric and nonparametric analysis of treatment effects.

  • Causal mediation analysis of the pathway from PTSD and depression to glycemic control in veteran populations.

Methods

Linear mixed-effects models (lme4, lmerTest, nlme); robust regression (robustbase, MASS::rlm); permutation tests (coin); emmeans marginal contrasts; causal mediation decomposition (causalweight, mediation); LASSO variable selection via glmnet; multiple imputation via mice.

Publications

The full publications list filtered by military-health, blast-injury, or va-cooperative-studies provides the relevant record, which includes papers from several completed VA Cooperative Studies Program trials and investigator-initiated studies in veteran populations.