Increase of precuneus metabolism correlates with reduction of PTSD symptoms after EMDR therapy in military veterans: an 18F-FDG PET study during virtual reality exposure to war

Abstract

International audience ; Reviewers' comments: Reviewer #1: Comments to Editor The manuscript "Increase of precuneus metabolism correlates with reduction of PTSD symptoms after EMDR therapy in military veterans: an 18F-FDG PET study during virtual reality exposure to war" by Rousseau et al deals with very actual topic: the disclosure of the neurobiology of psychotherapies. Furthermore, approaching such matter by PET activation studies, after about 30 years since the first 15O-H2O ones, using FDG might start a new season for this fascinating research field The manuscript is concise, well written and pretty clear in the aims, methods, results and discussion and in my opinion misses only a few information that will would improve its quality. I have a general comment and some minor specific remarks General comments The authors have recently published on the EJNMMI an editorial promoting functional 18F-FDG PET brain activation imaging. A similar study to the present one was published on the same Journal in 2015 (Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging (2015) 42:733-740) in which the very same protocol and methodology were used with the only difference that the stressing stimulus was olfactory and not visual. Since the readers of the present paper will be (firstly) nuclear medicine physicians it is opinion of this reviewer that the above paper should be quoted and the methodology implemented in both of them better "promoted" in the introduction and discussion to stimulate the colleagues to perform similar studies. It is also the opinion of this reviewer that it is a pity that the authors decided to submit such interesting and groundbreaking paper as short communication instead of full paper. Reply: Thanks to the Reviewer for his/her highly positive comments. As mentioned, we are limited by the constraints of a short communication that we indeed chose considering this work as a pilot study with the inclusion of only fifteen subjects. At the discretion of the Editor, the paper could possibly be considered for an Editorial to ...