One minute Adam Holbrook would be having an ordinary day — shopping, walking down the street, coaching a Little League game — and the next he would find himself back on combat patrol: heart racing, adrenaline coursing, the feel of his rifle in his hands, the odor of burn pits in his nose, in a world of dusty rooftops and dim alleys that all held the threat of danger and death.
It didn’t take much to trigger a flashback. The waft of a particular smell could do it, or even a glimpse of the sawtooth mountain range behind his house: suddenly they weren’t the mountains of Arizona, but of Afghanistan.
“And snap, I’d be back there,” said Holbrook, a U.S. Army platoon leader in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2009-2013. “It would be like I never left. Suddenly, I’m on patrol again.”
The episodes were frequent, unpredictable, and sometimes so powerful that he suffered seizures and blacked out. He was diagnosed with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). He tried every therapy his doctors recommended, but the dissociative episodes continued. Living a normal life was impossible. Living at all began to seem nearly so.
“The way I was going,” Holbrook said, “I was going to be a statistic.”
Then, via the VA Clinic in Rancho Cucamonga, California, he was referred to psychiatrist Ralph Koek, MD; neurosurgeon Jean-Phillipe Langevin, MD; and neuroscientist Nanthia Suthana, PhD, who was then at UCLA.
Suthana, who joined the Duke Department of Neurosurgery earlier this year as a Duke Science and Technology Scholar, studies the neural mechanisms of cognition and behavior. At Duke, she is continuing the cutting-edge research she began at UCLA, using advanced neuroimaging and electrophysiology technologies to investigate and treat neurological and psychiatric disorders.
When she met with Holbrook, she was working alongside Koek and Langevin to prepare a clinical trial to test a novel deep brain electrostimulation technique for severe PTSD.
“They did some tests and said, ‘You’re a candidate for this test we’re doing that involves a device we implant in your skull,’” Holbrook said. “By then, I was willing to try anything. So I was like, ‘Wow. OK, cool. Let’s do that.’”
Read the full story of Holbrook's treatment and Suthana's work on the Duke School of Medicine website.