Erasing the Pain of the Past
Scientists Are Developing Drugs That Could Eliminate Traumatic Events From
Our Memories

ABC News | March 20, 2007
RUSSELL GOLDMAN

March 20, 2007 - - "I'd take it in a second," said Sgt. Michael
Walcott, an Iraq War veteran, referring to an experimental drug with the
potential to target and erase traumatic memories.

Walcott, who served in a Balad-based transportation unit that regularly
took mortar fire, now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Since
returning to the United States two years ago, he has been on
antidepressants and in group therapy as he tries to put his life back
together and heal from the psychological scars of war. "There are
moments," he said, "when you just want be alone and don't want to
deal with everyone telling you that you've changed."

There are many others like Walcott. The Army estimates that one in eight
soldiers returning home from Iraq suffers from post-traumatic stress
disorder. Symptoms of the disorder, once known as shell shock, include
flashbacks, nightmares, feelings of detachment, irritability, trouble
concentrating and sleeplessness.

Much about why painful memories come back to haunt soldiers and those who
live through other traumatic experiences remains unknown. Scientists say
that is because little is known about how the brain stores and recalls
memories.

But in their early efforts to understand the way in which short-term
memories become long-term memories, researchers have discovered that
certain drugs can interrupt that process. Those same drugs, they believe,
can also be applied not just in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic
event - like a mortar attack, rape or car accident - but years later, when
an individual is still haunted by memories of event.

The hope is that a post-traumatic stress disorder patient can work with a
psychiatrist and focus a traumatic event, take one of these drugs and then
slowly forget that event. With that hope, however, comes a series of
ethical concerns. What makes up our personalities - the essence of who we
are as individuals - if not the collected memories of our experiences?

"This is all very preliminary," said Dr. Roger Pitman, a Harvard
Medical School psychiatrist. "We're just getting started. There is
some promising preliminary data but no conclusions."

Much of the research Pitman is currently conducting on human subjects at
Massachusetts General Hospital focuses on altering memories in the
immediate aftermath of a specific type of trauma - automobile accidents.
Subjects who arrive in the hospital's emergency room are prescribed either
the drug propranolol or a placebo.

Propranolol was originally developed to treat high blood pressure, but its
effect on the hormone adrenaline has made it popular among actors dealing
with severe stage fright, and scientists are now using it in their research
on memory.

"There is a period of time after you first learn something before it's
retained," Pitman explained. "This is called consolidation."

Some research has shown that stress hormones, particularly adrenaline, make
that process faster and more intense.

"That's why you remember what you were doing the morning of Sept. 11,
better than August 11," he said.

Some scientists believe that post-traumatic stress disorder is the result
of too much adrenaline entering the brain at the moment the memory of a
traumatic event is being consolidated, or stored, for the first time.

But "the real hot topic," Pitman said, is not consolidation but
reconsolidation, the process by which an old memory is recalled and the
same "window of opportunity" to alter it with drugs is opened for
a second time.

By getting soldiers, or others who have lived through harrowing
experiences, to remember their traumatic experiences through talking
therapy, the theory goes, the chance to target and erase those memories
presents itself.

Reconsolidation remains a "controversial" theory according to
Pitman, but Joseph LeDoux, a psychologist at New York University's Center
for Neural Science, said his recent experiments with rats adds to evidence
that it's real.

LeDoux is not trying to create a drug to treat humans. For him, the
specific drug isn't important. What is important is understanding the
process by which memories are retained and altered.

"The idea is that memories are vulnerable. They can be improved or
weakened. The main point is that we're trying to understand how this all
works rather than come up with a drug."


An Ethical Firestorm -- 'A Genie in the Bottle'

But the idea of improving or weakening people's memories gives many medical
ethicists pause. The President's Council on Bioethics has condemned
memory-altering research. The National Institutes of Health, however, has
funded some experiments that use propranalol for post-traumatic stress
disorder treatment, and Pitman said he has received a grant from the Army
to begin conducting similar research with Iraq veterans.

"There are several major concerns" about creating these kinds of
drugs, said Felicia Cohn, a medical ethicist at University of California at
Irvine's School of Medicine. "Is the act of altering memories even an
appropriate medical intervention?" she asked.

Another set of "issues is related to consequences. What are the
effects of altering a particular person's memory but not changing the
context the person is living in. We might erase a young girl's memory of a
rape, but people around her will still know and inadvertently remind
her," Cohn said.

"It becomes a genie in the bottle question. Once a drug is available
for use, it gets used appropriately and inappropriately. People could start
going to physicians to forget they love chocolate. . Is it just for
post-traumatic stress disorder and rape victims? Where do we draw the line?
Who gets to decide what is horrific enough?"
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Joe

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