Details of How Memories that Lead to PTSD Form

One of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the fact that most patients tend to develop strong, long-lasting memories of the negative experiences that triggered the condition. Experts recently managed to discover the mechanism that boosts the formation of such adverse memories.

According to researchers at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, it would appear that controlling this mechanism would give doctors a leverage over the intensity of PTSD symptoms people who suffer from the condition report.

Findings such as these could be used to open up new avenues of research in treating the condition. PTSD affects victims of natural disasters and other calamities, as well as a very high percentage of servicemen returning from theaters of operations around the world.

The United States Army, for example, is currently dedicating important researches to investigators trying to figure out how to cure stress disorder, or how to detect who is at most risk of developing it.

The new work was conducted by experts at the UB Henry Wellcome Laboratories for Integrative Neuroscience & Endocrinology (HW-LINE), which are based at the university's School of Clinical Sciences.

Details of the research effort appear in a paper entitled “Long-lasting behavioral responses to stress involve a direct interaction of glucocorticoid receptors with ERK1/2-MSK1-Elk-1 signaling.”

The work is published in the August 1 early online issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) funded the work.

According to the investigators, stress hormones that are produced during adverse experiences have a direct influence on the biochemical process that take place inside neurons when new memories are formed. The same processes control some aspects of learning as well.

This might help explain why adverse memories take hold so well, and become so hard to forget. As a result, sufferers become depressed and are forced to relieve their traumatic experience constantly. This incapacitates them, reduces their quality of life, and also makes them more prone to suicide.

“Making memories of events in our lives is of critical importance in order to cope properly with new situations and challenges in the future,” HW-LINE professorial research fellow professor Johannes Reul explains.

“This is of particular importance for emotional and traumatic life events. Our newly discovered mechanism should be regarded as an adaptive mechanism. We believe this mechanism could be disturbed in stress-related psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety,” he adds.

“The new findings may be of particular significance for patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as these patients are pained by pathological memories of an endured trauma (rape or war situations). We hope our discovery may help to generate a new class of drugs to help these patients,” the UB expert concludes.