DOD awards Hernandez-Tejada $2.3 million grant for pain and PTSD study
The U.S. Department of Defense awarded a five-year, $2.3 million Clinical Trial Award – Research Level 2 grant to Melba Hernandez-Tejada, PhD, DHA, associate professor in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, to study the effectiveness of an intensive two-week combined intervention of transcranial direct-current stimulation and massed prolonged exposure therapy delivered via home-based telemedicine for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and pain.
“Federal support for this project allows us to rigorously evaluate innovative telemedicine-delivered interventions that address the complex comorbidity of pain and PTSD,” Hernandez-Tejada said. “Our goal is to generate timely and robust evidence that will inform the advancement of treatment options and strengthen the care we are able to provide to active-duty service members and veterans.”
The award is funded by the Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program through the Department of Defense’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, which was established in 2007 to fund research that seeks to understand, prevent, and treat psychological health conditions and traumatic brain injuries while accelerating solutions to improve the health and care of service members, their families, veterans, and the public.
Hernandez-Tejada’s research will study two home-based telemedicine interventions using a repeated-measures randomized controlled design to examine the combined treatment’s effectiveness.
This randomized control trial is the first to combine these two interventions. The trial entails transcranial direct-current stimulation, a noninvasive brain stimulation technique using low electrical currents on the scalp to modify neuronal activity, combined with massed prolonged exposure, a well-established treatment for PTSD. The active and control groups will both receive prolonged exposure therapy, but the control group will receive a sham stimulation, or placebo, of the transcranial direct-current stimulation.
The sample of 146 veterans and active-duty personnel will allow researchers to determine the comparative effectiveness of the two treatments in terms of patient clinical outcomes and treatment satisfaction, attrition, and compliance. Additionally, the study will explore changes in blood biomarkers associated with stress and the inflammatory processes related to pain and PTSD symptom improvements after intervention.
Congress established the Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychological Health Research Program in response to brain injuries and psychological health issues experienced by deployed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The program complements ongoing Defense Department efforts to promote a better standard of care for psychological health and brain injury in prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation.