Texas Childhood Trauma Research Network
Research to Improve Mental Health Care for Texas Children in the Aftermath of Trauma
Who We Are
The Texas Childhood Trauma Research Network is comprised of 12 academic medical centers across the state of Texas that collectively aim to enhance understanding of how trauma affects children and adolescents. Exposure to traumatic events can lead to long-term emotional, behavioral, and cognitive challenges, such as anxiety, depression, difficulty in forming relationships, and academic struggles among others. The TX-CTRN data repository documents mental health symptoms and related factors over a 24-month period, with participants submitting structured data on an array of topics including trauma history, psychiatric symptoms, medical and psychiatric history, school performance, etc. The collected data aids in identifying risk and protective factors and improving care strategies for affected youth in Texas.
Funded by the state of Texas through the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium and led by Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff at UT Austin Dell Medical School and Dr. Karen Wagner at UT Medical Branch in Galveston, this initiative seeks to inform better treatment, education, and policy decisions to support children facing trauma-related challenges.
Latest News
News from Spencer's Desk
This is my first post...and an opportunity to demonstrate adding news content to the new texasctrn.org website. We are doing a walkthrough of the website with the CTRN Hub on May 9th to gather feedback for what needs to be added prior to public launch.
Overview of TX-CTRN Participation and Childhood Trauma Exposure
Traumatic exposures are displayed as percentages of the total participants ages 8-20 surveyed across Texas. The types of traumatic exposure are sorted in the order of the most commonly reported types to those less commonly reported. A portion of participants exposed to traumatic events develop symptoms of severe (criteria A1) trauma displayed by the orange bar. Some of the most common traumatic exposures include illnesses and injuries of close family and friends, hospitalizations and surgeries. Bullying and cyberbullying are relatively new categories which are included without an associated criteria A1 assessment.
Childhood Trauma and Exposure as a Percentage of Participation
TX-CTRN participant recruitment began in 2020 and has since grown to more than 3200 participants. Layers within the graph display the number of participants that have completed each milestone with those represented by the lowest (orange) layer of the graph having completed the full two-year study.
TX-CTRN Participant Recruitment and Retention
Displayed are the current participant distributions between male/female sex at birth and age.
Participant Demographics
The number of participants recruited within each health service region shows broad coverage in identifying childhood trauma exposures across Texas.