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HIPPOCAMPAL MORPOHLOGY AND CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
interview and DID was excluded. Hence, we refer to this patient group as “PTSD-only”. As both PTSD-DID and PTSD-only groups shared the diagnosis of PTSD, we further merged them into one larger group, referred to as “All- PTSD”, in order to investigate the common morphological features of PTSD.
HC were recruited through advertisements in local newspapers. Additional exclusion criteria for HC were: a high score of (psychoform/somatoform) dissociative symptoms (evaluated with the DES and SDQ-20, respectively), psychiatric disorder in the past or at present, or a high score on the TEC. All HC were free of present and past psychiatric medication. Exclusion criteria for all participants were: age outside the range of 18-65, pregnancy, systemic or neurological illness, claustrophobia, presence of metal implants in the body and alcohol/drug abuse. Details of psychotropic medications usage are provided in Table 3.1.
After complete description of the study to the subjects, written informed consent was obtained according to procedures approved by the Medical Ethical Committee (METc) of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and of the Amsterdam Medical Center (AMC).
Image acquisition
T1-weighted anatomical MR scans (MPRAGE, TR=9.95ms, TE=5.6ms, flip- angle=8o, 1x1x1mm voxels, number of slices=160, total scan-time=10m 14s) were acquired on two (UMCG and AMC) 3T MR scanners (Philips Medical Systems, Best, NL) in The Netherlands after a reproducibility study determined one optimized structural MRI protocol for the two centers (Chalavi et al. 2012). All-PTSD patients and their matched HC were scanned interleaved within a short time interval and the samples were balanced over the two centers: twenty All-PTSD patients (ten PTSD-DID, ten PTSD-only) and nineteen HC were scanned at UMCG (see supplementary material S3.1 for more details).
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