Loss of loved one? A terrible car crash? How about the stress of battle? These often unexpected events shape our lives, evoke painful memories and can make it difficult to function daily. But what if a pill could erase the pain associated with those memories? Would you take it?
For over a century, scientists and therapists have been trying to find a drug or psychological treatment that could extinguish undesired emotional memory. With no cure in sight, it seemed that once emotional memory was established, it lasted forever. But a recent study may have found the answer in a common prescription drug.
Previously, animal studies showed that fear memories can change when recalled. Reactivation of a memory can bring forth a flood of fear and dysfunctional behavior. But infusion of propranolol, a common blood pressure medication, into rats just after memory reactivation seems to block the fear previously associated with those memories.
Propranolol is known to block certain chemical receptors in the body and brain associated with a fear response. It’s been used for years to help people cope with stressful situations such as public speaking. But there had been limited attempts to use the drug to actually block reactivation of fearful memories. Now, researchers in Amsterdam have given human subjects the drug prior to memory reactivation.
The study, published in the online journal Nature Neuroscience, found that students who took propranolol after viewing fear-related images of spiders showed no fear response after seeing the pictures. The drug had disrupted the normal reactivation process of fearful memory recall. The students remembered the pictures but the element of fear was gone.
Traumatic events generate strong memories that, once recalled, can produce powerful reactions in the body – nervousness, sweating, fearfulness, anxiety, insomnia, lack of appetite, and so forth. The potential reduction of these reactions by propranolol suggests that the blocking of certain receptors in the brain disrupts the emotional reactivation of painful memories. While more research is needed, these findings have important implications for the treatment of persistent memories in individuals suffering from emotional disorders.See All House Calls by Dr. Geehr.