Jan. 13, 2015—It is typically hard to recruit veterans for a clinical study on PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). To admit to the disorder and seek treatment, which may involve some sort of psychotherapy, runs counter to the tough, stoic attitude embedded in military culture.
But one clinical trial may be doing better than most — a collaborative study out of the UC San Francisco Osher Center for Integrative Medicine and the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC). Its secret? The study offers a chance for veterans to exercise — something they’re quite familiar with. Then while they’re pumping weights, it teaches them how to breathe.
“Exercise is good for brain function, mood,” says Thomas Neylan, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and one of the study’s lead investigators. “It’s also good for sleep,” which is the number one complaint of people coming back from war, he says.
There’s also evidence meditation can alleviate PTSD symptoms.
“We thought, let’s combine and see if we get even more potency,” Neylan says.
To help patients out of their minds and into their bodies, participants in the UCSF Osher/VAMC study attend an exercise class at least three times a week for 12 weeks.
During the class, the focus is less on increasing strength than learning to tune into body and breath. For example, while lifting weights an instructor might encourage veterans to notice their breath or feel their arm muscles as they curl. Yogic postures are also introduced.
“We’re trying to get people into sensing what they’re doing, rather than thinking about it,” says Wolf Mehling, associate professor of clinical, family and community medicine at UCSF, and a study investigator. “It’s present moment awareness rather than thinking about the past or future.”
The class does not talk about spirituality and it does not teach meditation exactly. No one is sitting cross-legged atop a cushion on the floor. At the same time, the roots of the tools it teaches lie in Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. The classes, though, are entirely secular, putting a very Western spin on what started as Eastern concepts of centering the mind through body and breath.
Neylan, who leads the UCSF Osher/VAMC veteran study, says the preliminary, unpublished results for the clinical trial are encouraging.
PTSD has received a lot of media attention, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach for the intense rumination that characterizes the disorder. In fact, Neylan says it’s common that an effective treatment means only 30 or 40 percent of patients respond.
For the UCSF Osher/VAMC study, researchers are monitoring sleep and taking a close look at the brain with high resolution imagery, especially the hippocampus, known to be impacted by PTSD.
So far, he says participants show reduced symptoms and are reporting a better quality of life.
About 40 people have entered the study. The team eventually hopes to double that number. But first it needs to find more funding. And then it will begin the search for more vets.
-Judy Silber
