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Thirty-one people were filmed washing their hands with soap in a bowl. Thirty-one were filmed, repeatedly touching toilet paper stained with feces-like food stuffs, sprayed with an unpleasant smell and arranged around a dummy replica of excrement. And 31 were filmed making a series of random movements of the hands. They then watched their 30-second recordings – downloaded on smartphone apps – four times a day for a week, at regular intervals.
Then the members of the first two groups might think more clearly – less likely, perhaps, screaming like Lady Macbeth, unable to wash the imagined blood of her hands, "Out, damn place! Out, I say! "
The 93 people – aged 18 to 64 and of different bad and educational level – weren Hear for a Shakespeare drama. They were part of a study whose results were published Tuesday in Scientific Reports.
The participants were in good health but presented with the fear of the characteristic contamination of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, defined by the National Institute of Mental Health as a "common, chronic, and lasting disorder in which a person has uncontrollable and uncontrollable thoughts (obsessions) and behaviors (compulsions) that she feels the need to constantly repeat. "
Compulsive cleansing affects up to 46% of cases. According to Baland Jalal, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and senior author of the Scientific Reports, Baland Jalal is an anxious patient after a minor contamination, such as touching a doorknob or his own smartphone. Some reacted, he said, rubbing their hands until they bleed.
"I saw patients washing their hands eight hours a day," he said in an interview. "It can be debilitating, they are forced to go home, it's like living in a prison."
The paper argues in favor of a home remedy, away from the medical office, where the traditional approach has been to expose patients to dirt and prevent them from washing themselves. The team of neuroscientists and psychiatrists has discovered that another way to alleviate the symptoms of OCD is what is called "technology-based personalized medicine."
Participants were in good health but had a fear of the typical contamination of obsessive-compulsive disorder
. Photo: iStock
. In this approach, the washing experience, as well as The contamination is captured on video and reduced to the screen of a patient's smartphone, which serves both relief and mental gymnastics. Both remedies were tested against the control scenario in which some people simply watched each other gesturing at random.
No intervention – you watch yourself wash and expose yourself to apparent dirt – a real fear of contamination, which, according to the researchers, may be attributable to the brevity of the ent experience. The paper notes that the tests may have been too brief to influence the perceived need to wash, especially for those whose aversion to contamination was deeply rooted.
Both methods, however, reduced the levels of distress and severity of OCD symptoms, provided that random hand movement was controlled, while anxiety and depression were unchanged. Questionnaires and interviews were used to evaluate the psychological state of each participant according to a handful of scales.
The effect on TOC trends and mental treatment even "outside of immediate consciousness" was significant, the researchers said. 19659002] "Improving cognitive flexibility and OCD symptomatology, particularly in a clinical sample, could over time result in detectable reductions in fears of contamination," they write. The most striking, said Jalal, was the reduction of "cognitive inflexibility" – a rigid thought that undermines self-control – which is the main feature of OCD, he added, and who thought to be a mediator for excessive washing behaviors.
Jalal stated that research had taken place from his attempt to document "how disgust is embedded in the brain." In previous studies, he had examined how contamination and relief could be transferred "by proxy" – by watching someone touching something disgusting or by looking at "Joe there washing their hands".
The phenomenon is linked to the "illusion of the rubber hand", in which people can make themselves feel that an ersatz limb, lying in front of them, is their own. But Jalal wanted to know if there was a therapeutic effect when the replica is a recording of his own movements.
"My dream is that some children in Timbuktu who do not have access to health care or a psychiatrist can use something like that to get treatment for OCD," he said. declared. The smartphone app that itself and others have developed in Cambridge is not yet publicly available because it requires a clinical study.
Since the early 1980s, the non-pharmacological treatment of choice for OCD is what is called "exposure prevention and response," the paper explains. The goal is to help a patient overcome his fear by inducing anxiety while blocking his compulsive behavior. A doctor may require exposure to a contaminated object, such as a toilet seat, but prohibit washing.
Yet, up to 40 percent of patients do not respond to this treatment, paper grades. Jalal said many patients dropped out of treatment together.
Applications are easier. "You're sort of an exposure therapy experience in virtual reality," he said. The washing video offers relief, and could also lead to the realization that the abstention from obsessive behavior brings no danger, while the illusion of touching soiled objects "desensitizes you to disgust," Jalal said. The researchers are still trying to determine exactly why the two interventions – which seem to be contrary -. Have similar results, reducing the distress and improved cognitive flexibility
The main promise of these methods, the paper argues, lies in the exploitation of low-cost technologies puts patients in control of their own treatment. The results suggest that smart phones, some of which have actually related research to TOC, could also be a tool for reducing compulsive
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