Citation

Busser P, Guérin V, Coutance V, Blouet C, Bui E. Eur. J. Psychotraumatol. 2023; 14(2): e2196907.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, The Author(s), Publisher Co-action Publishing)

DOI

10.1080/20008066.2023.2196907

PMID

37070615

Abstract

In a recent issue of the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, Auren et al. (Citation2022) reported effectiveness data from a 2 week intensive programme for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), combining prolonged exposure therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), and physical activity. They found that between a half and two-thirds of patients exhibited a clinically significant improvement in PTSD symptoms, with large effect sizes on a range of psychiatric outcomes (d = 1.38-1.52), and quasi non-existent dropout. Their results, in line with prior data (Van Woudenberg et al., Citation2018), suggest that delivering physical activity in a group setting may improve the efficacy and/or acceptability of evidence-based trauma-focused therapies. Another recent paper (Van Toorenburg et al., Citation2020) found that difficulties in regulating emotions did not predict poorer outcome among patients undergoing an intensive trauma-focused treatment, delivered alongside group physical activity. The authors concluded that emotion regulation difficulties were not associated with worse trauma-focused treatment outcomes for PTSD; however, another explanation is that group physical activity may improve emotion regulation, as suggested by others (Bahmani et al., Citation2020). Among physical activities, fencing may be particularly effective in promoting emotion regulation, as it is both a high-intensity combat sport and a form of martial art. We delivered a fencing programme to female trauma victims, and would like to report our preliminary results on emotion regulation outcomes...

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; Female; *Rape; *Sex Offenses