|
 Researchers gave one group of veterans with PTSD eight weekly
2.5-hour sessions focused on mindfulness and meditation, as well as
a day-long retreat, and compared their progress to their peers who
received nine weekly 1.5-hour group sessions designed to address
specific problems stemming from PTSD in daily life.
With mindfulness-based therapy, 49 percent of veterans reported a
dramatic reduction in PTSD symptoms, compared with just 28 percent
of their peers who didn’t receive this type of treatment.
“Overall, the evidence from this study suggests mindfulness-based
stress reduction therapy may be a promising treatment for PTSD,”
lead study author Melissa Polusny, of the Minneapolis Veterans
Affairs Health Care System, said by email.
Roughly one in four veterans returning from deployments in
Afghanistan and Iraq suffer from PTSD, Polusny and colleagues report
in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.
Mindfulness-based group sessions help veterans learn meditation
techniques they can use at home to cultivate awareness of the
present moment during ordinary daily activities such as driving or
eating, she said. Breathing exercises and practices such as yoga are
also used to help encourage body awareness and focus on the present.
The other treatment used in the study, known as present-centered
group therapy, fosters concentration on the impact of trauma and
PTSD symptoms on daily life, with an emphasis on problem-solving and
coping mechanisms, she said.
Researchers randomly assigned 116 veterans recruited in 2012 and
2013 to receive one of the two types of therapy.
Veterans reported a greater improvement in quality of life after two
months with the mindfulness-based therapy than the alternative
approach.
With mindfulness-based therapy, veterans also reported a bigger
reduction in depression symptoms, but the difference between the
groups wasn’t big enough to rule out the possibility that it might
have been due to chance.
And while the veterans in the mindfulness group were more likely to
report that their PTSD symptoms had improved, those self-reported
improvements didn't mean they were any likelier to be cured of their
PTSD. In fact, after two months, the percentages of patients who no
longer had a PTSD diagnosis were similar, at 53 percent with
mindfulness training and 47 percent without it.
One limitation of the study is that the mindfulness training
involved more hours of treatment than the problem-solving therapy,
though the researchers say this reflects the way these treatments
are typically provided in real life.
[to top of second column] |
It's also possible that the two-month follow-up period was too short
and that the differences in outcomes might not persist over a longer
period time, Dr. David Kearney and Tracy Simpson, of the VA Puget
Sound Health Care System in Seattle, noted in an editorial
accompanying the study.
The mindfulness approach probably works by reducing hyper-vigilance
associated with PTSD, said Dr. Charles Hoge, a senior scientist at
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.
“However, this is only one component of effective treatment,” Hoge,
who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
Other components of PTSD treatment include narration of traumatic
experiences, examining thoughts surrounding the trauma such as
self-blame, and exercises focused on learning to face situations
that trigger strong reactions, Hoge said.
“Service members and veterans with debilitating PTSD symptoms often
need more than one approach to treatment, and may also need more
than nine sessions of treatment,” Hoge added.
Even so, relaxation training and stress reduction are often seen as
the “aspirin of behavioral medicine,” said Dr. Alan Peterson, a
psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San
Antonio who specializes in combat-related PTSD.
“Mindfulness-based stress reduction approaches are likely to work
just as well for non-veterans who have been exposed to civilian
traumas such as physical or sexual assaults,” Peterson, who wasn’t
involved in the study, said by email.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1IWdO7U and http://bit.ly/1IWdPZu JAMA, online
August 4, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
