On the trail of a cure to erase bad memories

Victims of rape, witnesses of the massacres, car accidents or military are often the wall of traumatic memories that paralyze daily.

Insomnia, the hallucinations, irritability and even depression are possible symptoms of what doctors call "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

For these people, the discovery by an international team of the ability of a protein to erase memories stressor is a source of hope. Researchers at the University of Puerto Rico had taught rats to associate a beeping sound with the arrival of an electrical discharge, creating a stress reaction. They were then injected with BDNF (brain-derived neutrophic factor) essential for memory and learning, in a part of the rat brain involved in emotional memory formation, the prefrontal cortex infralimbique.

Faced with the same tone as before, the rats did not show any anxiety, evidence that the memory stressful "learned" had been replaced by another, not including the concept of danger. BDNF is naturally produced by humans.

"It would be sufficient to stimulate its production by the human brain to help traumatized people to forget their bad memories," says Gregory Quirk, co-author of the study. According to him, several tracks are possible. Some existing drugs as mood stabilizers (eg Prozac) is already enough to increase the production of BDNF, but they require a long treatment and increase sensitivity to emotions, which can be cons-productive.

Development of drugs with targeted action research would be conducted in this direction at Emory University in Atlanta. It has also been proven that physical exercise encouraged the production of this molecule.

The discovery of team is exciting because of its rapid action to the treatments used so far. The speed of the management of the patient after a psychic trauma depends on its evolution in the coming months. Faster is better.

But here, the traumatic memory is replaced within 48 hours.

The doctor remains cautious about the prospect of seeing one day a "miracle pill". This is a model made on animals. In addition to the possible difficulties in developing a drug, and the time it would take, this discovery also raises an ethical problem.

For if one is able to respond so quickly, it might be tempting, eventually, to administer this treatment as a preventive measure, such as soldiers between two interventions on the ground.

The quest for a "molecule of forgetting" to avoid that trauma sink into the memory of interest to neurobiologists since the 1990s. Several of them, including propranolol, a beta-blocker, have already yielded interesting results. Howeve propranolol has the disadvantage of acting on the hippocampus, a brain structure which is very fragile.

In all cases the medication should never be a substitute for psychological treatment, in the form of an interview just after the event. No drugs can ever replace the eye of a doctor.

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