In the Hendrickson research group, we explore underlying biological mechanisms related to the development and maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related conditions, including mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Through the design and implementation of translational clinical studies, we also apply this work directly to the pursuit of new treatment options for people who have experienced a traumatic stress.

Ongoing research projects include trials designed to:

• Understand how the regulation of the stress-compound noradrenaline changes following a traumatic stressor, and how these changes result in the expression of PTSD symptoms in some but not all individuals.
• Test a working model of how increased release of noradrenaline during sleep alters the structure and function of sleep in ways that can produce or maintain daytime symptoms, and also may increase the long term risk of dementia.
• Identify biomarkers that can characterize the degree or type of noradrenergic dysregulation in individual patients, in order to facilitate improved translational research, and develop personalized medicine approaches to the clinical treatment of PTSD.
• Develop and test novel, aggregated N-of-1 clinical trial designs that are optimized for the identification and validation of biomarkers, including those that can predict treatment response.
• Understand how periods of occupational stress related to the covid-19 pandemic may result in acute and/or chronic symptoms of traumatic stress, and test whether sleep-focused interventions during or shortly after the period of exposure can affect short term function and/or change long term outcomes.

Techniques employed in our research group include:

• Multimodal assessment of biomarkers and the clinical presentation of individuals with and without PTSD, both in the absence of an intervention and before/after a pharmacologic intervention.
• Ambulatory monitoring of sleep, wake, and autonomic functioning, including via home polysomnography (PSG).
• Pupillometry and measurement of the pupillary light reflex.
• Hypothesis- and data-driven techniques for analyzing multi-modal, repeated-measure data sets, and statistical simulation and bootstrapping methods.