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New therapy for phobias and PTSD in the pipeline

Lumi · 2017-01-23 19:55:34

There have been some interesting developments using fMRI Decoded neurofeedback-based techniques as a therapy for Phobias and PTSD. The approach was shown to reduce anxieties triggered by specific fearful memories, without asking the patients the to think about them consciously - at least under laboratory conditions. You…

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23-01-2017 8:55pm

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Lumi

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Join Date: December 2007

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There have been some interesting developments using fMRI Decoded neurofeedback-based techniques as a therapy for Phobias and PTSD. The approach was shown to reduce anxieties triggered by specific fearful memories, without asking the patients the to think about them consciously - at least under laboratory conditions.

The research included 17 healthy volunteers who had a "fear condition" induced by being given sudden electric shocks while simultaneously being shown coloured patterns. This then lead them to fearfully responding when they were shown the same patterns again.

They then re-conditioned this response by analysing the participants' brains with fMRI to estimate the optimal "receptive window" and giving them a small monetary reward while showing the same patterns. They showed that this was successful and on re-exposure their fear was reduced.

You can read more about it here and there are links to the original research paper

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