Playing Tetris for fifteen minutes within six hours after an emergency caesarean section can prevent psychological trauma: researchers at the Swiss university say Lausanne.
Undergoing an unplanned cesarean section is a traumatic experience. After all, emergency surgery is only performed if there is a threat of serious injury or even death to mother or child. About one in five women who undergo an unplanned caesarean section subsequently develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Even more women suffer from symptoms of PTSD.
Why Tetris?
It has been known for some time that the game Tetris can help reduce PTSD symptoms in traumas such as traffic accidents. Researchers are not sure exactly how that works. The theory is that when playing this game, your brain is so busy visualizing how to orient the blocks that it disrupts another process: anchoring the traumatic event in your long-term memory.
Because PTSD after a difficult birth not only affects the mother herself, but also the newborn child and the rest of the family, Swiss scientists investigated whether a game of Tetris can also work wonders for women who undergo unplanned caesarean sections.
Anchoring memories
Your brain needs about six hours to convert a traumatic experience into a compelling memory. If you disrupt that process within those hours, the event would be experienced as less traumatic. To investigate whether this also applies to PTSD after emergency caesarean sections, half of the 146 women who participated in this study played tetris for fifteen minutes within six hours after giving birth.
The participants were re-examined six weeks and six months after the birth of their child. The Tetris group had significantly fewer PTSD symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, difficulty sleeping or being overly vigilant about the baby compared to the group that was given the task of keeping a short diary as a control.
Treatment in the future
Lead researchers Camille Deforges and Vania Sandoz are very enthusiastic about the results of their research. Mainly because of how simple the preventive treatment is. “This makes it easy to apply in regular care. Moreover, it is short, cheap and accessible to everyone, regardless of your native language.”
Future research should show how well people can assess whether their lives are in danger. In this study, only women were selected to participate if they indicated that they were afraid for their lives or that of their child during the operation.
In the Netherlands, more than 30,000 women give birth by caesarean section every year. For half this is planned, for the other half it is unplanned.
2023-10-08 09:02:32
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