- A new study indicates that an overactive amygdala before a traumatic event can suggest the possibility of PTSD development.
- Police recruits displaying increased activity in the dorsal amygdala faced a higher chance of PTSD after experiencing trauma.
- Trauma resulted in increased reactivity in the lateral amygdala and changes in brain connections in those affected.
- Stronger links between the amygdala and precuneus might explain PTSD flashbacks and self-intrusion.
- Active approaches like mindfulness or neurofeedback might assist in regulating fear sensitivity before trauma.
Can Amygdala Activity Indicate PTSD Risk?
Is it possible that understanding how your brain handles fear could help predict if you will develop PTSD after trauma? A significant neuroscience study proposes that it can. By concentrating on the brain’s threat-response center—the amygdala—researchers obtained new understanding into who might be biologically more susceptible to PTSD before any trauma happens.
What Is PTSD, and Why Doesn’t Everyone Get It?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complicated mental health condition brought on by experiencing or seeing a traumatic event, such as violence, disasters, or serious accidents. Individuals affected often report intense flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, disrupted sleep, emotional numbness, and constant states of high alert. These symptoms can persist for months, years, or even a lifetime, affecting a person’s ability to live normally.
Interestingly, not all individuals who undergo trauma develop PTSD. Population studies clearly show this difference. For example, in the Netherlands, approximately 80% of people will experience a traumatic event in their lifetime, yet only about 10% go on to develop symptoms that fit the criteria for PTSD (de Voogd et al., 2025).
This difference raises important questions: why do some people recover while others struggle with long-term psychological issues? Is it just the type of trauma, or do biological tendencies also have a part?
Your Brain’s Alarm System: Meet the Amygdala
Located at the neurological center of our fear response is the amygdala—a structure shaped like an almond and situated deep within the brain’s medial temporal lobe. This small but influential organ is in charge of spotting threats, starting the fight-or-flight response, and coordinating our emotional reactions to danger.
Essentially, the amygdala works as your brain’s initial warning system. It notices danger before your conscious mind can even process it. In milliseconds, it gets your body ready for action: pupils widen, heart beats faster, stress hormones flood the brain. Its ability to act rapidly has ensured our survival throughout history.
For people experiencing PTSD, studies commonly reveal an overactive amygdala, especially when reacting to things that are similar to their traumatic event—like loud sounds, certain smells, or aggressive actions. However, up to this point, scientists were uncertain if this increased activity was caused by trauma, or if it might have been present from the beginning.
That difference is vital. If we could dependably detect increased amygdala activity before trauma exposure, we might be able to predict who is more biologically susceptible to PTSD.
Pre-Trauma Brain Activity and PTSD: A Breakthrough Study
A significant long-term study conducted by Lycia D. de Voogd from Leiden University in the Netherlands addressed this exact question. The research followed 221 Dutch police recruits over an 18-month period—a group selected because they were likely to face traumatic events as part of their work.
What made this study so significant was its timing. Most PTSD studies begin after a traumatic event has happened. This one, conversely, assessed individuals before they experienced trauma. That allowed researchers to determine if particular patterns in brain activity could predict future PTSD risk.
Each recruit received functional MRI (fMRI) scanning and psychological evaluations before they started their field work. Then, as their actual experiences occurred—some traumatic, some less so—the neuroscientists monitored who developed PTSD symptoms and revisited their earlier brain data for indications.
The aim? To identify PTSD in its earliest biological sign.
Simulating Real-Life Stress: The Threat Anticipation Task
Before the recruits experienced trauma, they took part in a high-stress “threat anticipation task” intended to simulate danger in a lab setting. While inside the MRI scanner, recruits played a game that resembled real-world police decisions—shoot or don’t shoot.
In the interactive simulation, a virtual person approached the recruit in a parking garage. The person might pull out a weapon—requiring a simulated gunfire response—or harmlessly show a cellphone or object, where firing would be incorrect. Wrong decisions were penalized with a mild electric shock, adding importance, tension, and actual physiological stress.
However, here’s where it becomes interesting: the researchers were not focused on the reaction to the threat itself. Instead, they examined how the amygdala responded during the anticipation period—the stressful moment before the person revealed their intention.
This subtle difference—observing anticipatory brain signals rather than just reactive ones—turned out to be crucial in predicting PTSD risk.
The Predictive Power of Dorsal Amygdala Activity
The study’s key finding centered on activity in the dorsal amygdala—the part of the brain thought to coordinate stress responses and watchfulness. Researchers discovered that recruits who displayed higher dorsal amygdala activity during threat anticipation were considerably more likely to develop PTSD symptoms after experiencing real-life trauma on the job.
This suggests that some people’s brains are naturally “set up” to expect danger. Their threat detection system stays hyper-alert even before anything dangerous occurs. It’s similar to having a car alarm sensitive enough to be set off by a light breeze.
This understanding offers a powerful new way to view PTSD: susceptibility isn’t completely determined by events after they occur; it may equally come from how the brain anticipates them.
“This means that some of us are more sensitive to developing symptoms than others following a traumatic experience.”
— Lycia D. de Voogd, Study Author
Trauma’s Aftermath: Lateral Amygdala and Emotional Spillover
Monitoring the same recruits after being exposed to trauma provided another important finding: increased activity in the lateral amygdala among those who eventually developed PTSD symptoms. This activation happened when they were shown upsetting images and stimuli post-trauma during later brain imaging.
The lateral amygdala is known to process sensory information and emotional importance. Its hyperactivity likely shows the brain’s trouble in regulating emotional responses after trauma and might add to the typical overreactions seen in PTSD sufferers.
In this way, trauma doesn’t just activate pre-existing sensitivity—it may increase it.
Brain Connectivity: The Amygdala–Precuneus Link
The study also revealed convincing proof that the functional connection between brain areas changes in those at higher PTSD risk. Specifically, they observed stronger interactions between the amygdala and the precuneus in affected individuals.
The precuneus is involved in many higher-level cognitive functions: self-reflection, memory retrieval, and awareness. When excessively connected with the fear-processing amygdala, it could result in persistent reliving of the traumatic event. This connection may explain why people with PTSD experience such intense and intrusive flashbacks—they’re not just recalling trauma; they’re re-experiencing it.
This finding assists in connecting what PTSD sufferers report (feeling trapped in a traumatic moment) and how the brain rebuilds and replays fear-filled memories.
Translating Brain Science Into Prevention
If brain imaging can identify PTSD risk in advance, what happens afterward? The implications are significant—especially for high-risk professions.
Approaches might not need to wait until trauma has already had an effect. Research suggests that active brain training methods might strengthen emotional regulation and decrease hyperactivity in fear centers like the amygdala.
Potential Preventative Approaches
- Neurofeedback training allows individuals to observe their brain activity in real-time and learn to regulate emotional responses.
- Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has been shown to decrease amygdala reactivity and improve prefrontal regulation.
- Biofeedback tools can help handle physiological stress reactions during anticipation and crisis situations.
- Cognitive reappraisal training might guide individuals to reinterpret stress signals in real-time, possibly changing how the brain anticipates and responds to fear.
By identifying neurological tendencies beforehand, we may someday prevent PTSD before it begins—changing mental health care from reactive crisis handling to preventative science-based readiness.
Who Stands to Benefit Most?
The insights from this study are particularly valuable for emergency responders, military personnel, firefighting professionals, medical staff, and others who regularly participate in life-threatening or high-stress situations.
In these professions, regular contact with trauma is unavoidable. But being susceptible shouldn’t be inevitable. With brain-based risk assessments and personalized resilience programs, institutions have the chance to protect mental health more proactively than ever before.
Tools for High-Risk Occupations
- Include resilience training in academy or basic training programs.
- Adopt optional baseline brain scans or psychological evaluations.
- Encourage open conversation about mental health to lessen stigma before symptoms appear.
- Use results to customize specific, non-invasive preventative training (e.g., biofeedback, therapy).
Readiness in these fields must change to be as psychological as it is physical.
Limitations: Brain Patterns Indicate Risk, Not Fate
It’s vital to highlight that amygdala hyperactivity is a risk marker, not something that is set in stone. Having a reactive threat-processing system does not mean someone is destined to develop PTSD. Environment, coping resources, community, and access to mental health care are all important.
Additionally, this research was limited in scope
- It focused only on Dutch police recruits, whose experiences may not be the same as those of civilians or other professions.
- The sample lacked variety—future studies will need cross-cultural and wider demographic representation.
- The lab’s virtual threat tasks, while creative, can’t completely copy the trauma of field exposure.
- There’s a risk of over-labeling—or even discriminating against—individuals with natural emotional sensitivity if this information is misused.
Careful ethical thought will be needed to ensure brain science is used with understanding and in a helpful way.
The Future of PTSD Screening and Brain Science
We are moving into a time where neuroscience may allow mental health professionals to assess emotional risk profiles just as cardiologists assess heart risk. In the future, organizations could develop standardized “brain readiness” frameworks.
Research continues into defining neural signs for PTSD and other stress-related disorders. Personalized, preventative medicine may soon be used for mental health—starting new methods for resilience-building.
From trauma response teams to corporate HR, the future might include psychological check-ins informed by wearable biometrics, AI scan analyses, or customized emotional resilience plans.
What if trauma didn’t overwhelm us because we prepared for it beforehand?
Renewing Mental Readiness: A Proactive Vision
This new research on amygdala activity and PTSD risk increases our understanding—and our possibilities.
Instead of waiting for trauma’s psychological effects to show up, we may someday use neuroscience to recognize susceptibility early, provide focused training, and prevent suffering altogether.
In that future, brain science isn’t just understanding illness. It’s creating a more emotionally aware, resilient world.
Citations
- de Voogd, L. D., Hashemi, M. M., Zhang, W., Kaldewaij, R., Koch, S. B. J., van Ast, V. A., Klumpers, F., & Roelofs, K. (2025). Amygdala hyperactivity in PTSD: Disentangling predisposing from consequential factors in a prospective longitudinal design. Biological Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2025.02.894
