Dear Colleagues,

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that appears to develop after exposure to exceptionally threatening or inescapable horrifying events; these traumatic events include severe accidents, emotional/social abuse, physical assault, military combat, or natural disasters. Currently, the number of people diagnosed with PTSD in the United States is 24 million (~8% of Americans), costing $43 billion per year. At this point there are no effective strategies in use for determining a clinical diagnosis, controlling, and/or treating PTSD. Conventional wisdom has decreed that PTSD is a lifelong disorder and all treatment strategies are merely symptomatic, targeting the symptoms but not the exact etiology. The current treatment protocols rarely yield favorable results, and the use of antidepressants, antipsychotics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), beta-blockers, and benzodiazepines have many undesired side effects and limited effectiveness, further complicating PTSD. These disadvantageous pharmacological and therapeutic characteristics provoke a low adherence to treatment in an important percentage of patients afflicted by PTSD or concomitants caused by PTSD.

The current understanding of PTSD has no sufficient information/understanding to guide research. We have extensively reviewed the clinical research as well as the publication sources that define the current methods to diagnose PTSD and the aforementioned strategies of treatment. We have found an absence of evidence to support their claims. Additionally, research towards the development of an actual diagnosis or treatment protocol is very limited, almost nil. The absence of the ability to distinguish PTSD from other mental disorders is due to the lack of laboratory and clinical biomarkers for determining PTSD as well as the etiopathogenesis that causes PTSD.

The objective of this Special Issue is to put together, from the different research groups, recent findings regarding the implications of pharmacogenomics and mitochondrial genomics to identify specific biomarkers for determining PTSD; this will reveal avenues to use genomic knowledge as a strategy for the adjustment of medications that are used as a basis for treatment, the effectiveness of treatment, and prophylactics. Therefore, future analyses and newly developed protocols will allow for the development of pharmacogenetic profiles to not only appropriately diagnose PTSD but also determine the effectiveness of medications, allowing for the avoidance of undesired side effects or cumulative intoxication by using the correct mitochondrion selective medications at the right dosage for each patient.

I am very pleased to welcoming you to submit full-length original research and review articles to this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Gjumrakch Aliev
Guest Editor

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• Pharmacogenomics
• Mitochondrial genomics
• Mitochondrion and oxidative stress
• Aging and age-associated diseases
• Diagnosis and treatment of PTSD