Researchers have been able to demonstrate how the survivors of motor vehicle accidents have fewer such symptoms if they play Tetris in hospital within six hours of admission after also having been asked to recall their memory of the accident. The results of the study, which was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet with colleagues at Oxford University and elsewhere, are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Researchers have been able to demonstrate how the survivors of motor vehicle accidents have fewer such symptoms if they play Tetris in hospital within six hours of admission after also having been asked to recall their memory of the accident. The results of the study, which was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet with colleagues at Oxford University and elsewhere, are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect people who have experienced war, torture, rape, road accidents or other kinds of situations in which they felt their life, or that of another person, was in danger. While most people do not develop PTSD after trauma, one of the core clinical symptoms in those who do involves recurrent and intrusive memories of the trauma (colloquially referred to as ‘flashbacks’). Evidence based treatment for PTSD includes trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, however we lack preventative interventions to prevent the build-up of symptoms.
Emily Holmes, professor of psychology at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience, has spent many years studying the kind of preventative effects that behavioural interventions – such as a procedure including the computer game Tetris – can have on reducing intrusive memories after experimental trauma. Previously she has studied healthy individuals in controlled laboratory environments. Now, she and her Oxford colleague Dr Lali Iyadurai have taken their model for the first time from the laboratory into a clinical environment to study patients who had a traumatic motor-vehicle accident. Earlier studies show that roughly one in four people who have been in such accidents develop PTSD.
'Our hypothesis was that after a trauma, patients would have fewer intrusive memories if they got to play Tetris as part of a short behavioural intervention while waiting in the hospital Emergency Department,' says Professor Holmes. 'Since the game is visually demanding, we wanted to see if it could prevent the intrusive aspects of the traumatic memories from becoming established i.e. by disrupting a process known as memory consolidation.'
Read more at University of Oxford
Photo credit: Aldair Tetrovisk via Wikimedia Commons
