And I'm not talking about a drug that lets you escape from fear for awhile by getting you high, or a drug like Xanax that takes the anxious edge off. I'm talking about a drug that extinguishes fear. From here:
Researchers at MIT have identified a molecular mechanism that appears to control the formation of fears stemming traumatic events, a finding that could lead to a drug to treat people unable to live normal lives because of their fears.
In a report published online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience, Li-Huei Tsai and colleagues said an enzyme called cdk5 facilitates extinction of fear learned in a particular context and, in mouse studies, can be manipulated to eliminate that fear.
Emotional disorders such as post-traumatic stress and panic attack stem from an inability of the brain to stop experiencing fear associated with a specific incident or series of incidents.
In some people, disturbing memories don't fade with time, and may even get worse.
...For the MIT study, Tsai, a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and his team studied mice that had been genetically engineered to have inhibited or increased activity of the enzyme in the hippocampus, the brain's center for storing memories.
During the experiment, the mice got mild foot shocks while they were in a certain environment and then, later, re-exposed to the same environment without getting shocked.
Mice with increased levels of cdk5 had more trouble letting go, or extinguishing, the memory of the foot shock and continued to freeze in fear in the setting associated with the shock. But in mice that had inhibited activity of the molecule, the bad memory of the shocks seemed to have no effect once the mice learned they no longer needed to fear being shocked.
It's gonna be a long while before this results in a marketable drug -- if it ever does -- but the prospect is promising for panic patients.
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