KIPS BAY — Thanks to a $17 million donation, NYU Langone Medical center is able to create its first veterans’ mental health center to study post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, the center announced on Monday.
With the new funding, the veterans center will be able to accelerate the discovery of ways to identify PTSD and TBI, create lab tests for these disorders, and to develop treatments, including medicine and other therapies, said Charles Marmar, M.D., chair of NYU Langone's department of Psychiatry, who has been chosen to lead reasearch at the new center.
Specifically, the center will focus on biomarker research, which measures the effect or progress of PTSD and TBI, using urine, blood, saliva and even voice to track symptoms, said a spokeswoman for NYU Langone.
“They have a method of measuring stress in a voice,” the spokeswoman said.
The new research center will be named Cohens Veteran Center, after the donor Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Foundation.
“The Cohens’ investment will turbo-charge research conducted on these conditions,” said Marmar in a statement. “Without objective biological tests, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and TBI is incredibly difficult to get right.”
