By Girish Linganna
Mar 18: Facing your fears is an important practice that holds truth, as evidenced by exposure therapy which helps individuals confront their fears directly.Seeking support from professionals can help individuals process their trauma, allowing their brains to distinguish between actual traumatic experiences and non-threatening memories.
- Traumatic experience refers to a distressing or disturbing event that can have lasting emotional, psychological, and physical effects on an individual.
- Non-threatening memories are recollections that do not evoke feelings of danger, fear, or distress, and are typically benign or neutral in nature.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect the brain by hindering the ventromedial prefrontal cortex's regulation of areas such as the amygdala, leading to difficulties in controlling emotional responses.
In simpler terms, post-traumatic stress disorder can disrupt the brain's ability to control emotions and responses. This occurs when the part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions like fear (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is unable to effectively manage the region associated with processing emotions and memories (amygdala).This can make it harder for exposure therapy to work because it affects how well someone can remember things and learn about safety.
Researchers considered combining the treatment with another popular trauma therapy to address this problem and overcome the brain barrier.Their findings, recently published in JAMA Psychiatry, suggest that combining exposure therapy with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and virtual reality may offer a solution to this challenge. Says Popular Science.
- Transcranial means relating to or occurring through the skull or brain. It refers to a type of non-invasive brain stimulation that involves delivering electric currents to specific areas of the brain.
- In a recent study, a team from Brown University and the Providence V.A. Center conducted a new research project involving 54 military veterans in a double-blind study.
- A double-blind study is a research design in which neither the participants nor the researchers involved know who is receiving the treatment or the placebo during the study, reducing bias in the results.
Each volunteer consented to participate in six virtual reality (VR) exposure therapy sessions over a period of two to three weeks, which portrayed generic warzone scenarios.
Talking about their personal trauma repeatedly can be hard for patients, and this is a common reason why participants may drop out of psychotherapy," stated Noah Philip, the author of the study and a psychiatry professor at Brown University, as reported in Popular Science.People generally find this virtual reality (VR) exposure therapy to be more manageable.
In these 25-minute sessions, half of the veterans received painless 2 milliamp tDCS stimulations targeting their ventromedial prefrontal cortex at the same time.The remaining participants acted as control subjects and experienced a minor sensation intended to replicate the feeling of receiving tDCS treatment. This means that they did not actually receive the tDCS stimulation but felt a sensation similar to it for comparison purposes.
Researchers noted that veterans who received both therapies reported notable improvements in their PTSD symptoms after only three sessions, with a much larger decrease in problems reported during their one-month follow-up interviews.
Additionally, the combination of tDCS and VR therapy resulted in faster improvements compared to volunteers who only underwent VR exposure therapy. The tDCS/VR approach produced results in just two weeks that are typically achieved after around 12 weeks of exposure therapy alone.
It is important to mention that the initial group of participants in the study is relatively small, and further research is needed to fully understand how the treatment works over a longer period of time.However, the team aims to carry out similar studies on larger groups in the future, possibly including more treatment sessions with extended follow-up periods.