Sleep-based therapy could provide more effective treatment for PTSD.
Posted 10.17.2012 at 2:02 pm
9 Comments
Erasure
Lab mice administered a drug can forget fear-inducing memories in their sleep
Wikimedia
Memory-erasure technology is finally starting to follow Eternal Sunshine canon. In the latest breakthrough, Stanford University researchers announced at the Society for Neuroscience meeting that they are manipulating fearful rat memories. Like the University of Puerto Rico study involving injections that cause rats to forget fears, this research is chemical-based, but the magic happens while the rats sleep. The team at Stanford hopes that sleep-based therapies will expand options for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
First, researchers conditioned mice to fear the scent of jasmine by administering a shock every time the mice sniffed the scent. The mice showed the characteristic sign of fear the next day when the scent was present--they froze up anticipating the shock. One group of mice got the conventional treatment of extinction therapy-- repeated exposure to to the scent without the shock. The fear dissipated, but returned when they were placed in different environments.
The experimental group received a drug treatment to block the protein synthesis of the basolateral amygdala, the part of the brain that we think stores fearful memories as they went to sleep, when they once again sniffed the jasmine scent. When they woke up, they had diminished fear even when they left the cage where they initially learned the fear. The results show that with the administration of the drug, fearful memories are less likely to resurface after therapy.
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Alchohol kills old memories and brain cells too.
hopefully that mouse is forgetting about getting that tag stuck in his ear
A chemical lobotomy? Isn't Science wonderful? Everything can be solved with a pill. Kid acts up? Don't correct him, give him a pill. It's a wonderful world.
You can give me all the drugs you want, but she'll still be there in the morning.
Those are some btchin earrings
Sorry folks that is not an earring. It is one of the electrodes used to administer shock therapy to this happy little camper or campette. Anyone know where the other probe/prod was placed?
BTW: don't get me wrong. I aint one of those PETA folks. Too many of our fellow human citizens have been used as willing and/or unwitting subjects of similar experiments in the past. Considering the vast number of PTSD victims America's endless wars create, sacrificing a few mice brains may be necessary in the hope we won't have to lab-oto-mice too many more of our old Veterans and other returning Heroes.
What about nasty side effects? What if good memories were forgotten? You wouldn't know because you've forgotten them. Also could it ever be guaranteed that this stuff is 100% reliable???
Memories are what make us what we are, good and bad, you start messing with them and you're no longer you.
Isn't it wonderful what "doctors" do in the name of science? This will come in handy turning soldiers further into robots. You can return those low-class grunts to battle seven, eight, nine times with this wonder drug. And all it'll cost is the price of a pill and a few worthless lives. Who's bankrolling the study, folks?