Edna B. Foa, Ph.D.; University of Pennsylvania, PTSD Multidisciplinary Research Consortium Award

Under this consortium, which as you know includes a lot of studies, our study wants to compare doing prolonged exposure once a week, which is as is usually done versus doing it every day for 2 weeks, and see if doing the prolonged sessions every day and completing in 2 weeks would give us as good results and outcomes as doing it once a week over 10 weeks.

And the rationale and why we think it's so important is because a soldier comes back, whether he is going to separate from the Army or whether he is coming back in between deployments and he has PTSD, we need to take care of this patient and try to ameliorate his PTSD systems if possible, cure him, by reducing the PTSD symptoms as much as we can before he gets deployed back or before he goes into civilian life because having PTSD prevents people from functioning.

So if we have a limited time, if we could have the soldier 2 weeks concentrating and focusing on getting better, and after 2 weeks he's much better and he's ready to face life again then it's a very good way to deal with situations in which time is limited-as opposed to him coming back once a week. Treatment is going on for 3 months; that's a long time for under these circumstances.

Another reason why 2 weeks is really advantageous is that you can actually build extra centers that know how to do prolonged exposure really well and the soldiers can be sent to those expert centers for 2 weeks and really focus on getting well and then going wherever it's going. But if it's 3 months then it's a lot more difficult to kind of separate from-you need to separate from your family and be sent to expert centers.

So there is a real advantage in being able to do it-the treatment-in a very short time, and that's what we want to study. We want to study if it's possible. I mean it's possible obviously to do treatment every day but is it going to be as effective as doing it once a week?

The reason was that we know prolonged exposure works. In fact, prolonged exposure is the treatment that has the most evidence for efficacy. But we know that it works with civilians and we know that it works with veterans but there wasn't any study-there isn't any studies that look at it in military personnel. But the study is being done in Fort Hood. So all the participants are going to be from among the personnel, the Active Duty personnel in Fort Hood, we need more than 300 people to enroll for 41/2 years. And they're all going to be personnel from the-serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

So we will draw our patients from among this huge population of Active Duty personnel that are in Fort Hood.