Advances in European Psychotraumatology

E uropean Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) is now completing its third volume. It is exciting to see how the range of articles addressing both clinical issues as well as more basic research, include samples of simple and complex PTSD as well as other disorders such as substance use disorder (e.g. Gielen et al., 2012) or posttraumatic panic attacks (Joscelyne et al., 2012). The populations studied range from terrorist attack (Thoresen et al. 2012), disaster victims (Grimm et al., 2012) and refugees (e.g. Zepinic et al., 2012), to civilian war victims (e.g. Palgi et al.,) and veterans (Kitchiner et al., 2012), but also include journalists (e.g. Backholm & Björkqvist, 2012) and legal representatives of asylum seekers (Wilson-Shaw et al., 2012). The life span is covered with study populations ranging from children (e.g. Wittman et al., 2012) to the elderly (Glück, et al., 2012). Designs differ from large epidemiological studies (e.g. Karanci et al., 2012) to smaller innovative pilot studies (e.g. Poundja et al., 2012) or experimental setups (e.g. Sack et al., 2012). Biological measures are included, e.g. De Kloet et al. (2012) examine neuroendocrine and immunological measures in PTSD, as well as validation studies of questionnaires in important European languages such as French (de Fouchier et al., 2012) and Polish (Dragan et al., 2012). Well established trauma-focused interventions like exposure therapy are scrutinized for their use in clinical practice, e.g. Palgi et al., 2012, and newer interventions e.g. adding biofeedback (Morina et al., 2012) are explored for effectivity, in sum reflecting the wide variety of European and in fact worldwide psychotraumatology research.