The burden of early life stress in chronic inflammatory bowel diseases.

The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of early life stress (ELS) in a population with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and to estimate its burden on mental, physical, and digestive health. Ninety-three participants with IBD were asked to anonymously complete questionnaires (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form, Early Life Event Scale, Perceived Stress Scale, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale, Ways of Coping Checklist, Gastro-Intestinal Quality of Life Index questionnaire, and ad hoc questions about symptoms). The prevalence of patients with IBD who were exposed to at least one childhood abuse was 53%. Mental health and quality of life were significantly poorer in patients with IBD who were exposed to early abuse than in those who were not. Patients exposed to ELS had also more digestive perturbations and fatigue. These results suggest that early abuse should be considered a component of IBD care.

Reducing decision-making deficits in patients with brain injury: effect of slow-paced breathing.

Impairments in decision-making have been reported in brain-damaged (stroke/traumatic brain injury) patients with a wide range of lesion sites. Here, we propose that the performances of patients in complex sequential decision-making (DM) tasks can be explained by their negative affectivity, leading to deliberative processing associated with poor DM performances. We assumed that a slow-paced breathing (SPB) training, by reducing negative affectivity would improve performances in a complex DM task. For 24 days, 34 brain-damaged patients (16 males and 18 females; 12 had a hemorrhagic stroke, 17 with an ischemic stroke and 5 with a TBI), practiced either daily SPB or sham trainings for five min, three times a day. Before and after training, we assessed their vagal tone (electrocardiogram-ECG), affectivity (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule-PANAS) and certainty level (Dimensional Ratings Questionnaire-DRQ) and their performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. All participants showed initial weak performance, which improved only for patients in the SPB training condition. These results suggest that DM disorders in brain-damaged patients can be the consequence of their poor information processing strategy rather than an impairment in their DM abilities. Second, we showed that SPB could be efficient to normalize DM processes in brain injury patients.

Gut-Brain Coupling and Multilevel Physiological Response to Biofeedback Relaxation After a Stressful Task Under Virtual Reality Immersion: A Pilot Study.

Human physiological reactions to the environment are coordinated by the interactions between brain and viscera. In particular, the brain, heart, and gastrointestinal tract coordinate with each other to provide physiological equilibrium by involving the central, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Recent studies have demonstrated an electrophysiological coupling between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain (gut-brain axis) under resting-state conditions. As the gut-brain axis plays a key role in individual stress regulation, we aimed to examine modulation of gut-brain coupling through the use of an overwhelming and a relaxing module as a first step toward modeling of the underlying mechanisms. This study was performed in 12 participants who, under a virtual reality environment, performed a 9-min cognitive stressful task followed by a 9-min period of relaxation. Brain activity was captured by electroencephalography, autonomic activities by photoplethysmography, and electrodermal and gastric activities by electrogastrography. Results showed that compared with the stressful task, relaxation induced a significant decrease in both tonic and phasic sympathetic activity, with an increase in brain alpha power and a decrease in delta power. The intensity of gut-brain coupling, as assessed by the modulation index of the phase-amplitude coupling between the normogastric slow waves and the brain alpha waves, decreased under the relaxation relative to the stress condition. These results highlight the modulatory effect of biofeedback relaxation on gut-brain coupling and suggest noninvasive multilevel electrophysiology as a promising way to investigate the mechanisms underlying gut-brain coupling in physiological and pathological situations.