Now, she and her Oxford colleague Dr Lali Iyadurai have taken their model for the first time from the laboratory into a clinical environment to study patients who had a traumatic motor-vehicle accident. Previously she has studied healthy individuals in controlled laboratory environments. 'This first week after trauma can be important for our patients, who have to go home, recover and look after themselves, which can be hard to do if you’re getting intrusive memories of the trauma, often several a day.' - Dr Lali IyaduraiĮmily Holmes, professor of psychology at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience, has spent many years studying the kind of preventative effects that behavioural interventions – such as a procedure including the computer game Tetris – can have on reducing intrusive memories after experimental trauma. Evidence based treatment for PTSD includes trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, however we lack preventative interventions to prevent the build-up of symptoms. While most people do not develop PTSD after trauma, one of the core clinical symptoms in those who do involves recurrent and intrusive memories of the trauma (colloquially referred to as ‘flashbacks’). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect people who have experienced war, torture, rape, road accidents or other kinds of situations in which they felt their life, or that of another person, was in danger. The results of the study, which was conducted by researchers at Karolinska Institutet with colleagues at Oxford University and elsewhere, are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. Researchers have been able to demonstrate how the survivors of motor vehicle accidents have fewer such symptoms if they play Tetris in hospital within six hours of admission after also having been asked to recall their memory of the accident.