Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the quintessential disorder following high-violence exposure in low-resource contexts where timely diagnosis and equitable access to evidence-based treatments are often lacking. While its genesis is multifactorial, its presentation complex, and often layered by concurrent mental and physical health conditions, much progress has been made in identifying many of the underlying bio-behavioural and environmental mechanisms, and the influence of cultural factors, in conferring relative risk or resilience, and in developing and

maintaining PTSD . However, the vast majority of molecular and bio-mechanistic studies in PTSD have been undertaken in high-income countries, as well as outside the African continent, thus the current knowledge-base is far from being reflective of the global burden of the disorder. This presentation, with a focus on South Africa, will elucidate the epidemiology of trauma and the impact of childhood trauma in particular, in various high-risk samples, and the array of biological markers that have been identified and implicated in aberrant stress response processes in PTSD including genotypic, epigenetic, transcriptomic, endocrinological and immune markers, as well as sex-based contributors. I will argue that studies from diverse low-and middle-income country populations can contribute important epidemiological and biological insights.