Ten Minutes of Aerobic Exercise With Exposure Therapy Found to Reduce PTSD Symptoms - Neuroscience News

Summary: Augmenting exposure therapy with ten minutes of aerobic exercise reduces PTSD symptom severity for up to six months after a nine-week course of treatment ends.

But now a study led by UNSW Sydney psychologists has found that augmenting the therapy with 10 minutes of aerobic exercise has led to patients reporting greater reduction to PTSD symptom severity six months after the nine-week treatment ended.

At the end of each session, one group was put through 10 minutes of aerobic exercises, while members of the control group were given 10 minutes of passive stretching.

People in the aerobic exercise group on average reported lower severity of PTSD symptoms—as measured on the CAPS-2 scale—than those who had their exposure therapy augmented by stretching exercises at the six-month follow-up.

He says the goal of exposure therapy in treating PTSD is extinction learning, where a patient learns to equate something that up until now they have associated with the trauma, with a feeling of safety.

Exposure therapy would focus on these triggers and try to demonstrate they offer no threat, with the hope that after repeated, gradual exposure, extinction learning is embedded in the brain of the sufferer.

“Past studies have shown that very brief bouts of aerobic exercise can be helpful because they actually promote extinction learning in rats, and have also been shown to promote it in humans under experimental conditions.”.

Bryant’s knowledge, this is the first time the benefits of aerobic exercise in conjunction with exposure therapy have been observed in a clinical setting.

“Augmenting trauma-focused psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder with brief aerobic exercise in Australia: a randomised clinical trial” by Richard A Bryant et al.

Augmenting trauma-focused psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder with brief aerobic exercise in Australia: a randomised clinical trial.

Although exposure therapy is central in most front-line psychotherapies of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), many patients do not respond to this treatment.

We aimed to investigate the effects of brief aerobic exercise on the efficacy of exposure therapy in reducing the severity of PTSD.

We excluded participants aged 70 years or older, with imminent suicidal risk (reporting suicidal plan), presence of psychosis or substance dependence, history of moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury, or presence of a physical disorder or impairment that might be exacerbated by aerobic exercise (eg, back pain)

We randomly assigned participants (1:1) to nine 90-min weekly sessions of exposure therapy for PTSD with 10 min aerobic exercise or to the control group of exposure therapy with 10 min passive stretching

Between Dec 12, 2012, and July 25, 2018, we enrolled 130 participants with PTSD, with 65 (50%) participants randomly assigned to exposure therapy with exercise and 65 (50%) to exposure therapy with passive stretching, including 79 (61%) women and 51 (39%) men, with a mean age of 39·1 years (SD 14·4; range 18–69)

At the 6-month follow-up assessment, participants in the exposure therapy with exercise group showed greater reductions in CAPS-2 scores relative to those in the exposure therapy with stretching group (mean difference 12·1 [95% CI 2·4–21·8]; p=0·023), which resulted in a moderate effect size of 0·6 (0·1–1·1)

Brief aerobic exercise has the potential to augment long-term gains of exposure therapy for PTSD, which accords with evidence from studies in animals and humans on the role of exercise in modulating the extinction learning processes