14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists suggested that people with phobias can be helped with their fears if they are given a dose of the hormone cortisol.
The team from the University of Zurich found that giving this hormone to people before entering a situation which provokes anxiety reduces the fear and the anxiety.
Dr Cosmo Hallstrom, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, mentions that the treatment with the hormone will not keep people from avoiding the things which they fear. Current phobia treatments presuppose exposing the patient to little doses of the thing they are afraid of until full exposure to the factor, so they are no longer scared.
Cortisol, which is a glucocorticoid, is released in the brain by different phobias and appears to block the memory recall, reducing anxiety. Dominique de Quervain, a neuroscientist at the University of Z?rich, and his team have found in previous research that cortisol blocks the retrieval of traumatic memories, including those of physical assaults and severe car accidents. So they wondered whether cortisol actually calms fears rather than inducing them.
In order to find this out the scientists tested 40 people with social phobia and 20 with spider phobia. Some of the participants were given a cortisone pill while others were given a placebo an hour before the actual test.
The socially anxious volunteers were asked to recite a speech and to do an arithmetic task in front of a group of people, while the ones with the spider phobia were shown images of spiders. The participants were asked to estimate on a numeric scale (1 to 10) the amount of fear they felt.
In case of the socially anxious, the effect of cortisol was immediate: the cortisol group reported an average fear level of about 3, while the placebo group had an average of 5.
On the other hand, in case of spider phobia, both the cortisol and the placebo groups initially reported similar fear factors of around 7. However, after two weeks of "face your fear" treatment, the ones in the cortisol group reported an average of 4, while the situation of the placebo group remained unchanged. During the next session, a week later, when no drug or placebo was administered, the ex-cortisol group still reported the same reduced levels of fear, suggesting that the effect of the treatment lasted.
This suggests, says de Quervain, that combining cortisol treatment with behavioral therapy for phobias may speed up the process or produce longer-lasting results.
"The current findings suggest that people who have acute panic attacks develop agoraphobia [a condition in which people avoid situations or places associated with anxiety] because the lack of increase in cortisol means that they really retain the memories to a greater state," Dr. Eric Hollander at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City explained. "This leads to more profound avoidance, so it would fit with this notion that increasing cortisol could interfere with memory."
Scientists now plan to see in more detail how exactly does cortisol work, what it does precisely at the biochemical level. Other psychologists have also proposed to replace the image of the spiders with real spiders to see whether the results still hold in even more stressful situations.