BGU-Sheba Study: Alcohol Raised PTSD Risk for Nova Survivors
BGU-Sheba Study: Alcohol Raised PTSD Risk for Nova Survivors
October 29, 2024
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Family members visit the site of the Nova music festival massacre.
Times of Israel – Study shows Nova survivors who drank alcohol before Hamas attack more likely to suffer PTSD.
Researchers at Sheba Medical Center and Ben-Gurion University say that being under the influence of alcohol – and not drugs – worsened the psychological impact of Hamas’s horrific attack at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.
On October 7, 2023, about 4,000 civilians were attending the open-air music and dance festival near Kibbutz Re’im in southern Israel when hundreds of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the border from Gaza and rampaged murderously, slaughtering 364 people amid other atrocities, including gang rape and mutilation of victims.
“Alcohol consumption led to increased anxiety, stress and depression,” said Dr. Nitza Nakash, Director of the Clinic for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy at Sheba Medical Center, who conducted the study with Prof. Mark Weiser, Prof. Joseph Zohar, Prof. Raz Gross and medical student Tal Malka.
“The people who were under the influence of alcohol had higher rates of post-traumatic symptoms, depression, anxiety and disassociation,” Weiser told The Times of Israel.
Sheba Medical Center treated 232 survivors from one week to two months after the festival. The researchers sought to identify how alcohol and recreational drugs impacted the cognitive and stress response to the horrific event.
Researchers chose 126 survivors who met certain criteria, ruling out additional traumas and previous history of mental health disorders.
“We hypothesized that psychedelic drugs would cause higher levels of anxiety among the survivors,” Cohen told The Times of Israel. “But alcohol affected people’s memory motor skills and increased the risk for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).”
Weiser said the researchers also expected people who used drugs to be hyper-vigilant, more alert and more aware of their surroundings so that the attack would “hit them more directly.”
“But we were wrong,” Weiser said. “Alcohol and not drug use was associated with higher rates of post-traumatic symptoms, depression and anxiety.”
The researchers believe that disassociation disrupts the processing and integration of traumatic memories.
People at the festival who did not use any drugs or alcohol had significantly less difficulty coping with the trauma, the researchers said.
Israelis are concerned about young people in the aftermath of October 7 and the war, Weiser said.
“These unfortunate young people were exposed to a very severe trauma,” Weiser said. “Many of them do need our help, but the majority are not psychiatrically impaired, even though they’ve been exposed to the most horrible traumas you can imagine.”
“We’re programmed in our DNA to survive,” he said.
Read more on The Jerusalem Post>>
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