Dr. Ida Fonkoue

So this was dysregulated in patients with PTSD.

And then finally, what we saw in this individual with PTSD is that your rest and digest system, which is your parasympathetic nervous system, was not doing a good job at keeping heart rate down.

So that was impaired as well.

So you have in just one group of individual, you have four different, and this is for what I can, we studied four different risk factors.

So it's like a...

I want to say double WAMI, but this is triple.

I don't know what you say when it's quadruple WAMI.

So you have four risk factors in one individual.

So moving forward, looking at women, one of the reasons why young women that I study, we call premenopausal women.

These are women between the ages of 18 and 40 years old.

One of the reasons why this group is very interesting is that

As you will know, women before 40 years old or before menopause, if we use 40 as the age of menopause, for some women, it could be later.

Women before menopause are expected to be protected from all these cardiovascular diseases because of the hormone called oestrogen.

I call oestrogen the happy hormone.

Makes your blood vessels soft.

calm down your fight or flight response, allow your rest and digest to be higher, and then close off inflammation, have a good control on cortisol.

Everybody knows cortisol as that hormone of stress.

But, well, this is what people used to think.

Now with PTSD, in my study, I'm seeing something different.

I'm seeing that these young women almost have the physiology of women who have rich menopause, even though they're still young.