EMDR Pre-treatment Yoga for Complex Trauma (YOGA-EMDR)

Dominique JANUEL

Status: Enrolling

Conditions: Trauma, Psychological

Treatments: Other: 10 Sessions of yogatherapy associate with EMDR; Other: The second group will have EMDR without yogatherapy

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04431531

10477M-YOGA-EMDR

Details and patient eligibility

About

yoga is a technique of hope. Indeed, it is a practice that specifically combines postures, breathing technique and a state meditative. The combination of these elements produces multiple effects that are exposed to detailed in the publications of Bessel Van der Kolk (Price et al., 2017; Rhodes, Spinazzola, & van der Kolk, 2016; Van der Kolk, 2014; Van Der Kolk et al., 2014) and whose four main effects are summarized here:

• A regulation of the level of vigilance
• An improvement in self-awareness
• An increased sense of self-efficacy
• Improved metacognition, awareness and regulation emotional

Full description

Yoga practice has shown benefits in treating multiple physical or mental disorders (Barnes, Bloom, & Nahin, 2008; Khalsa, 2004; Ross, Friedmann, Bevans, & Thomas, 2013) and has recently been evaluated for PTSD. We identified six randomized controlled studies measuring the effect of yoga in women (mostly) who experienced childhood violence (see table). With the exception of one pilot study (Dick, Niles, Street, Dimartino, & Mitchell, 2014; Mitchell et al., 2014), all studies show a significant reduction in PTSD symptoms compared to the pre-treatment period and compared to the control group (waiting list group). In particular, it was shown that this reduction in symptomatology was comparable to that of other commonly practiced psychotherapies, such as the exposure techniques of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies or EMDR, and comparable to pharmacological treatments (Van Der Kolk et al., 2014). Prolonged yoga therapy would also significantly improve dissociative symptoms (Price et al., 2017). However, all these studies tested the effect of yoga therapy in isolation, without associating it with conventional and recommended treatments for trauma. However, given the fields of action of the yoga listed above, we think that it could be the ideal tool to prepare (in the pre-treatment phase) the work on traumatic memory. We believe that the combination of yoga therapy and EMDR would work in synergy to reduce complex PTSD and achieve a higher success rate than these individual approaches. In this work, we will use a yoga technique adapted to the treatment of psycho-trauma called "trauma sensitive yoga" (Emerson, 2015).

Enrollment: 66 estimated patients

Sex: Female

Ages: 18 to 70 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

. Women

• Meets diagnostic criteria for Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder according to ICD-11 criteria, related to childhood sexual abuse
• PCL-5 must be at least 45
• Age between 18 and 70.
• Free, informed and signed consent.

Exclusion criteria

Neurological disorders

• Pregnant women
• Severe and/or unstable somatic diseases
• Diseases resulting in serious motor disorders (e.g. people paralyzed)
• Patient not affiliated with social security, State Medical Aid (AME)
• Patient hospitalized under stress in psychiatric care at the decision of the state representative or in psychiatric care at the request of a third party,
• Patient under guardianship, curatorship and protection of justice
• Patient participating in parallel biomedical research
• French language not mastered
• Persons unable to give consent

Trial design

Primary purpose: Other

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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66 participants in 2 patient groups

yogatherapy-EMDR

Active Comparator group

Description:

one of the two groups will have yogatherapy treatment and Eye movement desensibilization reprocessing (EMDR)

Treatment:

Other: 10 Sessions of yogatherapy associate with EMDR

waiting list and EMDR

Active Comparator group

Description:

The other group will have Eye movement desensibilization reprocessing

Treatment:

Other: The second group will have EMDR without yogatherapy