Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Canadian Special Operation Forces Command With Ketamine Plus Cervical Sympathetic Blockade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Canadian Special Operation Forces Command (CANSOFCOM) operators have been extensively deployed in recent conflicts. They are at risk of trauma and blast exposure as well as the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and blast traumatic brain injury (bTBI). Current psychotherapy and pharmacological approaches provide suboptimal resolution of PTSD and bTBI symptoms. Prior research has shown that ketamine infusion and cervical sympathetic blockade (CSB) have reduced PTSD and bTBI symptoms. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A total of 11 patients, including CANSOFCOM members, were treated and followed. Pre- and post-intervention PTSD Checklist-5 and Neurobehavioral Inventory Scale (NSI) scores were recorded. Neurobehavioral Inventory Scale questionnaire was administered only to patients with a history of traumatic brain injury. Each patient received 4 ketamine infusion and bilateral CSB treatments, as per previously published by IRB protocol #00000971. RESULT: Two weeks post-intervention, average PTSD Checklist score reduction of 45.09 (n = 11). Two weeks post-intervention, average NSI score reduction of 40.7 (87.0% reduction) (n = 6). No other NSI scores were available. CONCLUSION: These findings highlight the importance of early intervention and ongoing evaluation in PTSD treatment. Ketamine infusion combined with bilateral CSB can provide a clinically significant reduction of PTSD and bTBI in the CANSOFCOM cohort. Of interest, another study of CSB alone as a treatment of bTBI, which used NSI assessment, showed a reduction of 53% on a 1-month follow-up. Our report demonstrated an 87% reduction in NSI score at 2 weeks. Possible physiological explanations and study limitations are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".