14 DAY TRIAL // Even shameful moments, like not having an erection or premature ejaculation can leave you with haunting memories that impair your sex life for a while. But what about the victims of a rape or the loss of a beloved one, when the effects on a person can go from excessive fear to depression and antisocial behavior?
Now an American-Canadian team from McGill University, in Montreal and Harvard University in Boston, believes it has come up with a solution for decreasing the effects of the bad memories in people's brains. A drug named propranolol selectively targets unwanted memories, while leaving others intact.
This drug is commonly employed for treating heart patients, but it was found to disrupt the way the memory was stored, a hope for patients with psychiatric conditions due to the post-traumatic stress.
Still, the research is at a very early moment and many are worried that the drug could potentially be overused. The team tested 19 crash or rape victims for 10 days with a drug, or a placebo. The subjects were put to recall their memories of the trauma they had experienced 10 years earlier. After a week of propranolol intake, those patients displayed less stress symptoms, like raised heart rate, when recalling the painful event.
The scientists think that memories are initially stocked in the brain in a flexible, fluid state before turning into hard-wired circuitry. When they are recalled, memories are once again turned fluid, a state that can be attacked. Propranolol could interfere with the biochemical pathways that permit a memory to "harden" after it has been recalled.
"Even if a treatment successfully dampened down bad memories patients could still be left with potentially debilitating symptoms, such as high fear levels," signaled Dr Monica Thompson, a consultant clinical psychologist at London's Traumatic Stress Clinic.
"One does not know what effect such a drug could have in the long term. After all, fear reactions are there to protect people from danger in the future." said Professor Chris Brewin, of University College London.