Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keaton St., Austin, TX, 78712, USA; Institute for Mental Health Research, University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd St. Stop E9000, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keaton St., Austin, TX, 78712, USA.
J Anxiety Disord. 2017 Aug;50:76-86. doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2017.05.010. Epub 2017 Jun 4.
Exposure therapy is an established learning-based intervention for the treatment of anxiety disorders with an average response rate of nearly 50%, leaving room for improvement. Emerging strategies to enhance exposure therapy in humans and fear extinction retention in animal models are primarily pharmacological. These approaches are limited as many patients report preferring non-pharmacological approaches in therapy. With general cognitive enhancement effects, exercise has emerged as a plausible non-pharmacological augmentation strategy. The present study tested the hypothesis that fear extinction and exposure therapy would be enhanced by a pre-training bout of exercise.
We conducted four experiments with rats that involved a standardized conditioning and extinction paradigm and a manipulation of exercise. In a fifth experiment, we manipulated vigorous-intensity exercise prior to a standardized virtual reality exposure therapy session among adults with fear of heights.
In experiments 1-4, exercise did not facilitate fear extinction, long-term memory, or fear relapse tests. In experiment 5, human participants showed an overall reduction in fear of heights but exercise did not enhance symptom improvement.
Although acute exercise prior to fear extinction or exposure therapy, as operationalized in the present 5 studies, did not enhance outcomes, these results must be interpreted within the context of a broader literature that includes positive findings. Taken all together, this suggests that more research is necessary to identify optimal parameters and key individual differences so that exercise can be implemented successfully to treat anxiety disorders.
暴露疗法是一种已确立的基于学习的干预方法，用于治疗焦虑症，其平均反应率接近 50%，仍有改进的空间。在人类中增强暴露疗法和在动物模型中增强恐惧消退保持的新兴策略主要是药理学方法。这些方法受到限制，因为许多患者报告在治疗中更喜欢非药物方法。由于运动具有普遍的认知增强作用，因此它已成为一种合理的非药物增强策略。本研究检验了这样一个假设，即在进行暴露疗法之前进行一次预先训练的运动可以增强恐惧消退和暴露疗法。
我们进行了四项涉及标准化条件反射和消退范式以及运动操纵的大鼠实验。在第五项实验中，我们在患有恐高症的成年人中进行了标准化虚拟现实暴露治疗之前，操纵了剧烈强度的运动。
在实验 1-4 中，运动并没有促进恐惧消退、长期记忆或恐惧复发测试。在实验 5 中，人类参与者表现出对恐高症的总体恐惧减轻，但运动并没有增强症状改善。
尽管在目前的 5 项研究中，在进行恐惧消退或暴露治疗之前进行急性运动并没有增强结果，但这些结果必须在包括阳性发现的更广泛文献的背景下进行解释。综上所述，这表明需要进行更多的研究来确定最佳参数和关键的个体差异，以便成功地将运动用于治疗焦虑症。
