New Drug Helps to Dampen Bad Memories

wile_e_wonka writes to tell us Researchers at Harvard and the Montreal-based McGill University are working on a drug that would allow psychiatrists to dampen painful memories in their patients when combined with therapy. "They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo. A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma."

Re:Would this be the formula?

[bl8n8r]

> Would this be the formula: CnH2n+1OH?

acylic alcohol: http://alcohol.alto-infotech.com/ [alto-infotech.com]

I'd prefer a nice fat marley.. no hangover. Natural too.

60 Minutes piece

[artemis67]

60 Minutes did a report on a drug (Propranolol) that has a similar effect, and is already available on the market (to treat a different symptom). What was interesting about the report was the relationship between adrenaline and the formation of memories; i.e., the bigger the adrenaline surge, the more powerful the memory that is created.

Here's the whole segment, chopped up into bite-sized morsels:

The Memory Pill [yahoo.com]

Ever wonder if the original author reads TFA?

[TheMohel]

It's not a new drug that was tried by Harvard and McGill, it was an old favorite, propranolol. This is a nonselective beta blocker that has anti-adrenaline actions (oversimplifying radically) in the CNS as well as across the body, and it's used for a dozen purposes other than this one. This was actually fascinating research, because they're basically using an old standby drug to help desensitize certain traumatic memories. There was no assertion in the original article (other than the Star Trek pandering at the end) that the memories were eliminated entirely, although eliminating emotional tags to memories would have the side effect of making them harder to recall.
 
We know that the beta blockers have significant mood and activity side effects. In fact it's a common limitation on their use. In this case, though, it looks like the researchers are capitalizing on these side effects to make people's handling of trauma better. Cool. This is a use that will probably see more significant human clinical trials in the short run. Propranolol is a very cheap and very well-understood medication.
 
In the case of the rat studies with the actual new drug, it's early but interesting work that might or might not have human implication in the future. I'll be nervous about it without a lot more research, and I suspect that the greater degree of wiring in the human brain and the relative resilience of memory are going to be harder nuts to crack, at least in the short term.

Re:Just these memories? Or all?

[stonecypher]

How does a drug target specific memories?

There are quite a few substances which are already known to target memories. This just happens to be the first one which isn't somewhat poisonous. I don't know the underlying mechanism for this one, but several derivatives of hemlock reveal a toxin which is both highly polar and ferromagnetic. It's quite simply attracted to the cells of the brain that are currently in use; you tend to start losing what you're thinking about during the poison's course through the body. Read about the Roman Senate; that kind of toxin was blamed repeatedly for the change of several specific Senators' positions.

Now, granted, that particular substance does a lot of other damage to the body and brain too, but if you were to combine that kind of mechanism with a molecule dependent on some surface receptor on the parts of the brain responsible for memory storage...

We don't know jack about the brain, to be blunt.

Actually, most current brain medication was designed from scratch. We know quite a bit about the brain. There's a lot left to learn, but several antipsychotics in current use were put together by an engineer who wanted specific results. Don't confuse that you don't know jack about the brain with that the rest of us don't.

LSD has been out for decades now and we still don't have a clue just how that stuff works.

Actually, we've understood LSD for about a decade. Try keeping up with the literature if you're going to feign familiarity.

Yet we keep cranking out more pills for "mental" problems.

And most of them replace something older, and almost all of them are an improvement on what they're replacing. What, precisely, is your point?

Why do I also have the feeling that this pill would only suppress the traumatic experience instead of making people deal with and resolve it?

Probably because it's blatantly obvious that you can't resolve something you don't remember. Y'know, that whole common sense thing.

Instead of curing, we treat. Which is incidentally also more profitable, because a cured person is just that, cured. Doesn't need more medication.

People who argue based on assumptions are tiresome and boring. This is a permanent effect. Try reading about the pill before assuming it's a lifelong commitment; it isn't.

Also, I'm not sure if you knew this, but if the treatment isn't permanent, it's not a treatment. I realize the semantic difference you're trying to make, but perhaps you should spend some quality time with a dictionary. Treatments are permanent. That's why it's called "treated wood."

Treatment, though, can take months, years, decades or however long you want.

Wrong. It's not a treatment until the day it's successfully, permanently over.

I presume it also reduces Déja Vu experiences

[ardle]

I'm not surprised that the drug described in the 60 Minutes show had similar effects; it's the same drug! [209.85.135.104]

FTFA (first sentence in second paragraph):

In a new study, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, the drug propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims.

Here's a Slashdot discussion on it from Jan 2006 [nyud.net]
And here's the most useful post from that discussion [slashdot.org]

Re:Just these memories? Or all?

[Hatta]

Actually, we've understood LSD for about a decade.

Knowing that LSD is a partial agonist at the 5-HT2a (and to some extent 1a) receptor is a far cry from knowing "how LSD works". How does stimulation of those receptors create the subjective LSD experience?

Re:Would this be the formula?

[utopianfiat]

H3C-H2COH = ethanol
methanol will make you go blind.

Re:You don't look too happy...

[(negative video)]

We already have therapeutic techniques which allow for the effective treatment of PTSD, and more recently a bump in the effectiveness and practicality of exposure therapies.

Requiring the person to spend hundreds of dollars and take dozens of hours off work.

This drug basically serves no meaningful purpose beyond the lining of the pharmaceutical corporations pocket books.

A 10 day course of propranolol has a full retail price of $4. And most of that is the overhead of having a pharmacist count out the pills.

Using drugs whether legally prescribed medications or illicit drugs is not something which promotes self awareness, ...

We're not talking about stopping awareness, we're talking about stopping excessive amygdala-based aversive fear conditioning, which is an involuntary, unconscious process.

... nor does it teach an individual how to cope with sudden resurgences of symptoms and ways of avoiding similar problems in the future.

The goal is to reduce resurgences, not paper them over with coping training. And regarding future avoidance, just how often are you planning on repeatedly raping or burning the same person?

Most psychiatric medications have a purpose and proper formal testing, but they as of now have yet to prove that any of the medications do anything other than just cover over the existing problems. There is no actual evidence which demonstrates that the medications are actually doing anything related to the initial dysfunction.

RTFA. The study described demonstrated lasting psychiatric changes, of a character reasonably believed to be improvements, in humans. Incidentally, propranolol has been around for decades and has a long history of benefits for several acute and chronic neuropsychiatric conditions.