1 in 3 young war veterans not responding to post-traumatic stress treatments: Australian professor

one in three young war veterans were not responding to current therapies and new treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder need to be developed, said a leading psychiatrist on Tuesday.

University of Melbourne Professor David Forbes said underlying factors could be the reason PTSD treatments were less effective for some returned service men and women.

"We also need to be able to continue to innovate new treatments for those third who don't seem to be responding currently," Forbes told Xinhua.

"Some of it is in relation to other problems that are interfering with their accessing of therapy," he said. "For example, we know that for veterans with strong co-existing anger problems - it affects their capacity to benefit from existing PTSD treatments."

"We're currently looking into the potential to have targeted anger first to allow the veteran to feel safe when doing PTSD treatment."

Forbes co-authored an editorial published Monday in the official journal of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) where he and Sandy McFarlane said more effort was needed to get neuroscience breakthroughs into practice.

They said clinics had been too slow to adopt new tests such as one recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States that uses brain function measurements to predict the effectiveness of anti-depressants.

Forbes is currently trying to identify the barriers veterans have towards PTSD treatment before he plans to target those mechanisms specifically through "psychological interventions and neuro-biological interventions".

"There are also a range of broader considerations around how to enhance the treatment outcomes, for example things like concentration and working memory," he said. "Problems with working memory seem to interfere with treatment outcomes so we're looking into how to address things like cognitive functioning and emotion regulation problems."

A 2010 study found 8 percent of Australian Defence Force personnel, who have served in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in recent years, had PTSD. Endi