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By Girish Linganna
March 18th: Facing your fears is an important practice that contains truth, as demonstrated by exposure therapy that helps people face their fears directly. Seeking support from professionals can help people process their trauma, allowing their brains to distinguish between real 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 memories that do not evoke feelings of danger, fear, or distress and are generally benign or neutral in nature.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect the brain by making it difficult for the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to regulate areas such as the amygdala, leading to difficulties controlling emotional responses.
In simpler terms, PTSD can disrupt the brain’s ability to control emotions and responses. This occurs when the part of the brain responsible for regulating emotions such as fear (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) is unable to effectively manage the region associated with processing emotions and memories (amygdala). This can make it difficult for exposure therapy to work because it affects how well someone can remember things and learn about safety.
The 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. Popular science says.
- Transcranial means relating to or occurring through the skull or brain. It refers to a type of non-invasive brain stimulation that involves sending electrical currents to specific areas of the brain.
- In a recent study, a team from Brown University and the Providence VA 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 receives the treatment or placebo during the study, reducing bias in the results.
Each volunteer agreed to participate in six virtual reality (VR) exposure therapy sessions over a two- to three-week period, depicting generic war zone scenarios.
Repeatedly talking about your personal trauma can be difficult for patients, and this is a common reason why participants may drop out of psychotherapy,” said study author Noah Philip, a professor of psychiatry 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-milliampere tDCS stimulations targeting their ventromedial prefrontal cortex at the same time. The remaining participants served as control subjects and experienced a minor sensation intended to replicate the sensation of receiving tDCS treatment. This means that they did not actually receive the tDCS stimulation, but felt a similar sensation for comparison purposes.
The researchers noted that veterans who received both therapies reported notable improvements in their PTSD symptoms after just three sessions, with a much greater 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 underwent VR exposure therapy alone. The tDCS/VR approach produced results in just two weeks that are typically achieved after approximately 12 weeks of exposure therapy alone.
It is important to mention that the initial group of study participants is relatively small and more research is needed to fully understand how the treatment works over a longer period of time. However, the team intends to conduct similar studies in larger groups. in the future, possibly including more treatment sessions with extended follow-up periods.