Abstract
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is still unclear whether symptoms remission through EMDR therapy is associated with a beneficial effect on one of the PTSD symptoms, sleep disturbance. Our objective was therefore to study sleep parameters before and after symptom remission in soldiers with PTSD. The control group consisted of 20 healthy active duty military men who slept in a sleep lab with standard polysomnography (PSG) on two sessions separated by one month. The patient group consisted of 17 active duty military with PTSD who underwent EMDR therapy. PSG-recorded sleep was assessed 1 week before the EMDR therapy began and 1 week after PTSD remission. We found that the increased REMs density after remission was positively correlated with a greater decrease of symptoms. Also, the number of EMDR sessions required to reach remission was correlated with intra-sleep awakenings before treatment. These results confirm the improvement of some sleep parameters in PTSD after symptoms remission in a soldier's population and provide a possible predictor of treatment success. Further experiments will be required to establish whether this effect is specific to the EMDR therapy.
Highlights
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
We found that the total sleep time (TST) (r = 0.56, p = 0.02), sleep period time (SPT) (0.61, p = 0.01) and duration of N2 sleep (0.56, 0.02) after treatment were all significantly positively correlated with the number of EMDR sessions; though none remained significant after Holm-Bonferroni correction
We examined the associations between PTSD symptoms remission and sleep parameters in military-related PTSD subjects, and further compared them to a group of healthy military service members
Summary
Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is still unclear whether symptoms remission through EMDR therapy is associated with a beneficial effect on one of the PTSD symptoms, sleep disturbance. The number of EMDR sessions required to reach remission was correlated with intrasleep awakenings before treatment. These results confirm the improvement of some sleep parameters in PTSD after symptoms remission in a soldier’s population and provide a possible predictor of treatment success. Sleep problems do not always improve after otherwise successful treatment for P TSD4,24–26
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