NCT02945709

Attention Control Treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ׂ(PTSD)

Attention Control Treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 60 (actual)
• Sponsor: Tel Aviv University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 70 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The purpose of this study is to explore the efficacy of Attention Control Training for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). ACT was found to be effective in decreasing attention bias variability and PTSD symptoms in combat veterans (Badura-Brack, et al., 2015). It is now important to continue the examination of ACT's efficacy in additional populations of patients with PTSD. Such extension of treatment to other traumatic experiences raises the question of whether the threatening content of the training material could be personalized for each patient.

Detailed description

The aim of this study is to explore the efficacy of Attention Control Training for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). ACT was found to be effective in decreasing attention bias variability and PTSD symptoms in combat veterans (Badura-Brack, et al., 2015). It is now important to continue the examination of ACT's efficacy in additional populations of patients with PTSD. Such extension of treatment to other traumatic experiences raises the question of whether the threatening content of the training material could be personalized for each patient. For this purpose, we will recruit participants that are diagnosed with PTSD and will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: personalized ACT, non-personalized ACT, or control training We expect that personalized ACT will produce greater reduction in PTSD symptoms relative to a non-personalized ACT, and that both these conditions will be more effective in symptoms reduction than a control condition not designed to affect attention or expose patients to threat stimuli. We also expect the ACT conditions to reduce attention bias variability relative to the control condition.

Conditions

• PTSD

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Personalized Attention control training (ACT)	In this intervention, participants will be trained with a personalized Dot-Probe task. Each participant will perform the task with the set of words that he or she ranked as the most threatening according to a Word Ranking Task.
BEHAVIORAL	Non-personalized Attention control training (ACT)	In this intervention, participants will be trained with the same Dot-Probe task as in the personalized condition, except that the word stimuli will be randomly fit for each participant. It should be noted that 25% out of the words in this condition will be high ranked words according to each patient's word ranking. The aim of this is to enhance similarity to a generic ACT intervention (see Badura-Brack et al., 2015), where there is some degree of exposure to what one may consider "personalized" stimuli (i.e., threat words that were randomly included by the researchers), although it is not deliberately set to idiosyncratic preferences.
BEHAVIORAL	Control training.	In this intervention, participants will perform a computerized task, similar to the Dot-Probe task. In each trial, one neutral word will be presented at the center of the screen and participants will respond to a probe ('E' or 'f') presented following the removal of the words display. This version does not include the essential ingredients thought to reduce PTSD symptoms in the other dot-probe tasks: exposure to threat content and competition on attentional resources. Thus, this control version provides a control condition for the ACT interventions.

Timeline

• Start date: 2016-10-01
• Primary completion: 2019-12-01
• Completion: 2019-12-01
• First posted: 2016-10-26
• Last updated: 2020-06-22

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Israel