Neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms of PTSD in immigrants and refugees: A review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) disproportionately affects immigrant and refugee populations due to cumulative trauma exposure across pre-migration, peri-migration, and post-migration phases. This narrative review synthesizes neurobiological and psychosocial research to elucidate mechanisms underlying PTSD in immigrant groups. Neurobiological analyses reveal hippocampal atrophy, amygdala hyperactivity, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) hypoactivity mirrored in rodent models of chronic stress. These changes correlate with memory fragmentation, hypervigilance, and impaired fear extinction, exacerbated by acculturation pressures, discrimination, and socioeconomic hardship. Immigrants and refugees exhibit PTSD rates exceeding 30% in some cohorts, compared to approximately 3–4% in non-immigrant populations. While neurobiological studies often focus on non-immigrant populations and psychosocial research overlooks biological mechanisms, this review demonstrates how structural inequities such as limited healthcare access interact with dysregulated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function to amplify vulnerability. The findings underscore the need for integrated interventions addressing both neurobiological and structural determinants to reduce PTSD burden in displaced populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".