Muss’ Rewind treatment for trauma: description and multi-site pilot study

Abstract

Background: Rewind is a brief trauma-focussed imaginal exposure treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however evidence for this treatment is limited.

Aim: The aim of this paper was to provide preliminary evidence of its efficacy in the treatment of PTSD symptoms.

Method: A practice-based pre-post treatment design with an intention-to-treat analysis was used. Sixty three people were treated with Rewind in three separate services. Participants were assessed using the Impact of Events Scale (IES) prior to treatment and were re-assessed at a two-week follow-up. All participants who scored above 25 on the IES were included and there were no other exclusion criteria.

Results: There was an overall data capture rate of 95%. After treatment, 55 (87%) participants were below the IES clinical cut-off and, other than three participants with missing data, all participants showed reliable improvement using the IES Reliable Change Index.

Conclusion: These preliminary findings suggest that Muss’ Rewind may offer a useful treatment for PTSD symptoms. Rewind may be cost-effective, given the number of sessions that were required and the relative effectiveness of newly trained therapists in delivering the therapy. Despite methodological limitations, these results suggest that a randomised controlled trial is warranted.

• Rewind
• PTSD
• trauma
• imaginal exposure
• single session

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge all participants who participated in this present study. We are also grateful to the organisations and therapists who also participated in this pilot project.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data with anonymised raw scores for each of the sites can be accessed on the Mendeley database at DOI: 10.17632/4tw2kg4tkr.1.

Notes

1 Published with permission in personal communication from David Muss.

2 The Muss Rewind protocol was devised prior to the Coffey et al. (2006) clinical cut-off. As the Muss protocol was being evaluated, the initial Muss inclusion criterion of 25 was adhered to. Nonetheless, all participants were also above the Coffey cut-off of 27.