It might be important when doing HRV biofeedback with PTSD subjects to assess clearly their dissociative component. We published a paper recently that shows differences in brain activation for in our case PTSD mothers vs. controls exposed to stressful mother-child visual stimuli as a function of the severity of the case-mothers' Dissociative Experiences Scale scores.

The paper: Moser DA, Aue T, Wang Z, Rusconi-Serpa S, Favez N., Peterson BS, Schechter DS (in press). Comorbid dissociation dampens limbic activation in violence-exposed mothers with PTSD who are exposed to video-clips of their child during separation. Stress, 16(5):493-502.

We also published a paper related to this same populations autonomic nervous system response using HR and HRV:

Schechter DS, Moser DA, McCaw JE, Myers MM (epub 11.06.2013). Autonomic functioning in mothers with interpersonal violence-exposure related posttraumatic stress disorder in response to the stressor of separation-reunion. Developmental Psychobiology

The comorbidity with Major Depressive Disorder for these subjects did not significantly affect the results.

I hope this might be useful.

Best of luck,

Dan Schechter

Thanks, I will integrate it in our publication

Sorry colleagues if I insert me with consideration sthat apparently should not have a direct link. It seems to me that instead it is of inteerst particularly for psychophysiological studeis that I have experienced so long.

I am not here to outline you the importance of the HRV current studies and I have not to remember you that the current linear or non linear methodologies are not completely satisfactory. Of course every day we find papers published also in valuable international journals that continue to use standard linear indexes and FFT or DFT for their clinical investigations and conclusions. Non linear methodologies have their valuable content also if currently they still do not find a continuous clinical appreciation. Usually three bands are considered in the frequency domain , as you well know, the VLF, the LF , and the HF for short 5-6 minutes recording. We need to remain in this framework, we need to use such bands for our estimations but my modest opinion is that the basic methodology as well as the physiological setting need to be advanced. This is the reason because we have studied for several years a new method, called the CZF method. We have verified, however, that such method, although of great interest, results of difficult interpretation for some clinicians. Consequently we have elaborated a new method, the new CZF version , that , in addition to the rigour of the previous formulation , gives results that give immediate clinical interpretation.

The method as well the software for your experimentation are given in our site www.saistmp.com Consequently I invite all you to visit the site and go to use such new method in your experimental as well as clinical conditions and verify directly its interest. The present software is the primary elaboration. Within a brief time we will give the complete version responding to all the formulation of the method. All the researchers that , at this time, will result using currently such new CZF method will receive obviously automatically the updates.

A final question. We have experienced the method on a large number of subjects and in some different pathological conditions. Consequently don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help, suggestions, questions, previous results that may help you in your use of the method.