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Helping children and adults with hypnosis and biofeedback.

Cleve Clin J Med. 2008 Mar;75 Suppl 2:S39-43

Authors: Olness K

Hypnosis and biofeedback are cyberphysiologic strategies that enable subjects to develop voluntary control of certain physiologic processes for the purpose of improving health. Self-hypnosis has been used with and without biofeedback for a wide range of therapeutic applications, and both laboratory studies and clinical trials have shown it to be effective in improving symptoms and outcomes in various disorders. More formal Cochrane reviews of hypnotherapeutic interventions are currently under way. Thorough patient assessment should precede training in self-hypnosis in order to properly tailor training strategies to patient preferences and characteristics, especially for children. Workshops offered by various clinical societies are available to train health professionals in self-hypnosis.

PMID: 18540145 [PubMed - in process]

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Heart-rate control during pain and suggestions of analgesia without deliberate induction of hypnosis.

Int J Clin Exp Hypn. 2008 Jul;56(3):255-69

Authors: Santarcangelo EL, Carli G, Migliorini S, Fontani G, Varanini M, Balocchi R

Heart rate and heart-rate variability (HRV) were studied through a set of different methods in high (highs) and low hypnotizable subjects (lows) not receiving any deliberate hypnotic induction in basal conditions (simple relaxation) and during nociceptive-pressor stimulation with and without suggestions of analgesia. ANOVA did not reveal any difference between highs and lows for heart rate and for the HRV indexes extracted from the series of the interbeat intervals (RR) of the ECG in the frequency (spectral analysis) and time domain (standard deviation, Poincare plot) in both basal and stimulation conditions. Factors possibly accounting for the results and likely responsible for an underestimation of group differences are discussed.

PMID: 18569137 [PubMed - in process]

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Beneficial Effects of Hypnosis and Adverse Effects of Empathic Attention during Percutaneous Tumor Treatment: When Being Nice Does Not Suffice.

J Vasc Interv Radiol. 2008 Jun;19(6):897-905

Authors: Lang EV, Berbaum KS, Pauker SG, Faintuch S, Salazar GM, Lutgendorf S, Laser E, Logan H, Spiegel D

PURPOSE: To determine how hypnosis and empathic attention during percutaneous tumor treatments affect pain, anxiety, drug use, and adverse events. MATERIALS AND METHODS: For their tumor embolization or radiofrequency ablation, 201 patients were randomized to receive standard care, empathic attention with defined behaviors displayed by an additional provider, or self-hypnotic relaxation including the defined empathic attention behaviors. All had local anesthesia and access to intravenous medication. Main outcome measures were pain and anxiety assessed every 15 minutes by patient self-report, medication use (with 50 mug fentanyl or 1 mg midazolam counted as one unit), and adverse events, defined as occurrences requiring extra medical attention, including systolic blood pressure fluctuations (>/=50 mm Hg change to >180 mm Hg or <105 mm Hg), vasovagal episodes, cardiac events, and respiratory impairment. RESULTS: Patients treated with hypnosis experienced significantly less pain and anxiety than those in the standard care and empathy groups at several time intervals and received significantly fewer median drug units (mean, 2.0; interquartile range [IQR], 1-4) than patients in the standard (mean, 3.0; IQR, 1.5-5.0; P = .0147) and empathy groups (mean, 3.50; IQR, 2.0-5.9; P = .0026). Thirty-one of 65 patients (48%) in the empathy group had adverse events, which was significantly more than in the hypnosis group (eight of 66; 12%; P = .0001) and standard care group (18 of 70; 26%; P = .0118). CONCLUSIONS: Procedural hypnosis including empathic attention reduces pain, anxiety, and medication use. Conversely, empathic approaches without hypnosis that provide an external focus of attention and do not enhance patients’ self-coping can result in more adverse events. These findings should have major implications in the education of procedural personnel.

PMID: 18503905 [PubMed - in process]

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Neurolinguistic approach to natural language processing with applications to medical text analysis.

Neural Netw. 2008 Jun 7;

Authors: Duch W, Matykiewicz P, Pestian J

Understanding written or spoken language presumably involves spreading neural activation in the brain. This process may be approximated by spreading activation in semantic networks, providing enhanced representations that involve concepts not found directly in the text. The approximation of this process is of great practical and theoretical interest. Although activations of neural circuits involved in representation of words rapidly change in time snapshots of these activations spreading through associative networks may be captured in a vector model. Concepts of similar type activate larger clusters of neurons, priming areas in the left and right hemisphere. Analysis of recent brain imaging experiments shows the importance of the right hemisphere non-verbal clusterization. Medical ontologies enable development of a large-scale practical algorithm to re-create pathways of spreading neural activations. First concepts of specific semantic type are identified in the text, and then all related concepts of the same type are added to the text, providing expanded representations. To avoid rapid growth of the extended feature space after each step only the most useful features that increase document clusterization are retained. Short hospital discharge summaries are used to illustrate how this process works on a real, very noisy data. Expanded texts show significantly improved clustering and may be classified with much higher accuracy. Although better approximations to the spreading of neural activations may be devised a practical approach presented in this paper helps to discover pathways used by the brain to process specific concepts, and may be used in large-scale applications.

PMID: 18614334 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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Meditation with yoga, group therapy with hypnosis, and psychoeducation for long-term depressed mood: a randomized pilot trial.

J Clin Psychol. 2008 May 5;

Authors: Butler LD, Waelde LC, Hastings TA, Chen XH, Symons B, Marshall J, Kaufman A, Nagy TF, Blasey CM, Seibert EO, Spiegel D

This randomized pilot study investigated the effects of meditation with yoga (and psychoeducation) versus group therapy with hypnosis (and psychoeducation) versus psychoeducation alone on diagnostic status and symptom levels among 46 individuals with long-term depressive disorders. Results indicate that significantly more meditation group participants experienced a remission than did controls at 9-month follow-up. Eight hypnosis group participants also experienced a remission, but the difference from controls was not statistically significant. Three control participants, but no meditation or hypnosis participants, developed a new depressive episode during the study, though this difference did not reach statistical significance in any case. Although all groups reported some reduction in symptom levels, they did not differ significantly in that outcome. Overall, these results suggest that these two interventions show promise for treating low- to moderate-level depression. (c) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 64(7): 1-15, 2008.

PMID: 18459121 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

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