Typically, if you have an intense traumatic experience, such as combat in which buddies are shot in front of your eyes, that memory is etched in your brain forever. Currently, large numbers of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan experience trauma from battle. According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine of trauma victims experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and at least six out of every ten solders returning from Iraq suffer from PTSD.
Good news is that scientists have been “testing a pill that,
when given after a traumatic event like rape, may make the resulting memories less painful and intense.” On the other hand has this pill been tested enough to know the long term effects? Is it wise to administer pills that have been tested on small populations? There is much to ponder on both sides of this story.Psychiatrist Hilary Klein could have offered it to a man who had apparently returned from war whom she treated at a St. Louis shelter over the Labor Day weekend. He had fled New Orleans and was so distraught over not knowing where his sisters were that others had to tell Klein his story.
“This man could not even give his name, he was in such distress. All he could do was cry,” she said.
To show how this new medication has been tested, Canadian and Harvard University researchers reveal, “the first study to test this approach on 19 longtime PTSD sufferers has provided early encouraging results.” A McGill University psychologist who heads the study claims that 10 more people are needed to show solid evidence.
There is also hope based on other studies. University of California neurobiology researchers show that brain protein may be linked to depression. James McGaugh and Larry Cahill are searching for the connection between brain protein and depression. They show that “memories, painful or sweet, don’t form instantly after an event but congeal over time. Like slowly hardening cement, there is a window of opportunity when they are shapable. During stress, the body pours out adrenaline and other “fight or flight” hormones that help write memories into the “hard drive” of the brain.” Here’s how the PTSD research is currently shaping:
Propranolol can blunt this. It is in a class of drugs called beta blockers and is the one most able to cross the blood-brain barrier and get to where stress hormones are wreaking havoc. It already is widely used to treat high blood pressure and is being tested for stage fright.
Dr. Roger Pitman, a Harvard University psychiatrist, did a pilot study to see whether it could prevent symptoms of PTSD. He gave 10 days of either the drug or dummy pills to accident and rape victims who came to the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room.
In follow-up visits three months later, the patients listened to tapes describing their traumatic events as researchers measured their heart rates, palm sweating and forehead muscle tension.
The eight who had taken propranolol had fewer stress symptoms than the 14 who received dummy pills, but the differences in the frequency of symptoms were so small they might have occurred by chance — a problem with such tiny experiments.
Still, “this was the first study to show that PTSD could be prevented,” McGaugh said, and enough to convince the federal government to fund a larger one that Pitman is doing now.
Meanwhile, another study on assault and accident victims in France confirmed that propranolol might prevent PTSD symptoms.
I sense there is great hope for our returning troops but I have questions about how fast we should jump in to provide these precious men and women medications that are based on research studies with small numbers of participants involved and which have not been studied for long term effects.
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