The Effect of Hypnotic Suggestion on Sleep, Patient-Reported Outcomes, and Awareness following Acquired Brain Injury

Hypnosis has been successfully applied in neurorehabilitation, including for motor disorders, aphasia, pain, and vertigo. However, cognitive rehabilitation using hypnosis has received little attention. Here, we report the interview-data from an RCT on 49 patients with chronic cognitive sequalae following acquired brain injury. Patients were randomized to two groups, who initially received suggestions either from a classical hypnosis tradition (“targeted”) or from a mindfulness tradition (“non-targeted”). After four sessions of hypnosis and a 7-week follow-up period, the median need for sleep and rest improved from 8.58 hours to 8.00 hours and from 8.30 hours to 7.38 hours in the two groups respectively. Patients set goals in their everyday lives, and after eight sessions of hypnosis, they indicated large improvements with “same” (13 %), “better” (44 %), “much better” (18 %), or “not a problem anymore” (25 %). The experience of “not a problem anymore” exclusively occurred after the targeted hypnotic suggestion treatment. An exploratory factor analysis showed no relationship between objective improvements and self-reported improvements (all |Kendall’s τ| < .2), indicating that subjective reports following hypnotic suggestion should be interpreted with caution. Based on our findings and converging evidence from the literature, we conclude that hypnotic suggestion is a promising method in cognitive neurorehabilitation following acquired brain injury, but it should be regarded as experimental until at least one further high-quality RCT is published.