Bisson, a professor of psychiatry at Cardiff (Wales) University and the chair of the ISTSS guidelines committee, provided an advance look at the ISTSS guidelines, which have since been released.
The ISTSS guidelines, based on the group's meta-analyses of 361 randomized controlled trials, rated most of the diverse psychosocial, psychological, and pharmacologic interventions that have been proposed or are now actually being used in clinical practice as either "low effect," "interventions with emerging evidence," or "insufficient evidence to recommend." Those interventions are not backed by sufficient evidence of efficacy to be ready for prime time use in clinical practice.
The ISTSS guidelines concluded there is "insufficient evidence to recommend" escitalopram, propranolol, gabapentin, oxytocin, or docosahex-aenoic acid within the first 3 months for prevention or treatment of PTSD symptoms.
The ISTSS guidelines rate only two single-session interventions for prevention as rising to the promising level of "emerging evidence" of clinically important benefit: single-session eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), which in its multi-session format is a well-established treatment: with strong evidence of efficacy in established PTSD, and a program known as Group 512 PM, which combines group debriefing with group cohesion-building exercises.
Participants were chosen by using all the members listed as MSWs in the
ISTSS directory and who resided in the United States (n = 151).
Twenty-six healthy young college students (13 men and 13 women) were recruited for the validity study of the ISTSs for evaluating AT (group A).
All subjects performed the ISTSs with and without arm support in a random sequence (according to a protocol developed from a previous study) and a CE test with a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 14 days separating the tests (Nakamura et al., 2014).
James Halpern, Ph.D., and his colleagues reported at the annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS).
Respondents lacked confidence to the greatest extent with delivering cognitive processing therapy and eye-movement de-sensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)--both of which are recommended in the new ISTSS best-practice guidelines for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
These data were presented in part at the 20th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (
ISTSS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 16, 2004.