NCT06848127

Study of Emotional Dysregulation in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

At the Frontier of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder: Characterization Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Via an Ecological, Physiological and Cognitive Approach to the Emotional Dysregulation

• Status: Not Yet Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 170 (estimated)
• Sponsor: University Hospital, Strasbourg, France · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

This study aims to characterize emotional dysregulation in complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) and to determine the extent to which it can promote the distinction with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As emotional dysregulation is a dynamic process whose phenomenological manifestations are labile, associated with physiological modifications and modulated by cognitive processing, a multiple methodology associating measurements in a real-life ecological context with measurements performed in the hospital will be preferred. Overall, this study proposes to capture, for the first time, the clinical manifestations associated with cPTSD from the perspective of emotional dysregulation and its underlying processes

Conditions

• Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)
• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
• Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Self-questionnaires	All subjects (healthy volunteers and all patients) will complete a battery of self-questionnaires, assessing emotional dysregulation, traumatic symptoms, alteration of the sense of self, sensitivity to social rejection, dissociative symptoms, child abuse, functional repercussions of the disorders, depressive and anxiety symptoms and Impulsivity.
OTHER	Cognitive assessment	Completion of cognitive assessment, consisting of verbal fluency tasks , emotional Hayling, a dissociative associative memory retrieval task, a negative priming task and a heart rhythm detection task. The tasks of associative-dissociative memory retrieval, negative priming and heart rhythm detection will be coupled with a physiological recording, via a Biopac, to measure the change in skin conductance, body temperature and heart rate. The negative priming task will also be associated with the recording of eye movements allowing an indirect measurement of attentional orientation.
OTHER	Momentary Ecological Assessment (EMA)	A momentary ecological evaluation protocol will be proposed (between visits V1 and V2 for all subjects and between V3 and V4 for the 4 groups of patients) in order to assess emotional and symptomatic dynamics in a daily life context through a connected wath. During 7 days, subjects will be invited, via their smartphone, to carry out daily semi-random readings (indicated by smartphone notifications) of their subjective emotional experiences (10 once/day), but also spontaneous (by reporting emotions deemed intense immediately afterwards that they take place).
OTHER	Semi-structured interviews ITI and DSCID-II	ITI International Trauma Interview is a semi-structured interview consisting of one part allocated to the description of a traumatic event and two parts addressing the symptoms of PTSD (i.e. reliving, avoidance and alteration of wakefulness) and the symptoms of the disturbance of self-organization. The SCID-II Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Personality Disorder is a 90-item semi-structured interview, covering all 10 categories of personality disorder as described in the DSM-IV.

Timeline

• Start date: 2025-03-01
• Primary completion: 2027-03-01
• Completion: 2027-12-01
• First posted: 2025-02-26
• Last updated: 2025-02-26