The real take home is
that PTSD needs immediate treatment in order to positively modify the memories
established by the trauma. Drug
therapies are now been pursued but it is already known that other approaches
help as well. Thus hitting it hard from
the beginning is powerfully indicated.
At least we know.
I am optimistic
regarding PTSD and suspect that this will become a medically well managed
problem. We already have recently
identified sonic scalpels as a plausible tool to work around physical damage
and work on ayahuasca strongly suggests drug protocols that can isolate induced
trauma.
The tragedy is that so
many have and will die before we really get our medical act together.
New Drug Could
Potentially Treat PTSD
Update Date: Jan 16, 2014 12:07 PM EST
Posttraumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) is a mental condition often caused by a traumatic experience
that involves symptoms such as severe anxiety. One of the most common treatment options
for PTSD is psychotherapy, which reenacts the traumatic experience for the
patient in a safe and controlled environment. Now, according to a new study,
researchers identified a drug that has the potential to improve the treatment
of PTSD.
For this study,
neuroscientists from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) examined the effects of a type of
drug called an HDAC2 inhibitor. This type of drug can make the brain more
malleable. The researchers found that when rats were given the HDAC2 inhibitor,
the rats' traumatic memories could be removed. The researchers believe that if
this drug were to be given to patients who did not respond well to
psychotherapy, the effects of therapy would ideally be improved.
"By inhibiting
HDAC2 activity, we can drive dramatic structural changes in the brain. What
happens is the brain becomes more plastic, more capable of forming very strong
new memories that will override the old fearful memories," explained
senior author, Li-Huei Tsai, the director of MIT's Picower Institute for
Learning and Memory.
The researchers also
found that older memories are harder to extinguish. They concluded that time
could play a
huge factor in determining the effectiveness of the drug in treating PTSD.
"If you do
something within this window of time, then you have the possibility of
modifying the memory or forming a new trace of memory that actually instructs
the animal that this is not such a dangerous place," Tsai said.
"However, the older the memory is, the harder it is to really change that
memory. Our experiments really strongly argue that either the old memories are
permanently being modified, or a new much more potent memory is formed that
completely overwrites the old memory."
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