A WIDELY used blood pressure medicine could help people overcome post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The drug seems to make it easier for people to learn to stop being afraid of a past experience. It successfully helped people in a lab test lose a mild fear they had just developed.
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People can experience PTSD after a frightening event, such as聽an assault or car crash. It can be聽debilitating, and involves nightmares and flashbacks. Antidepressants and therapy that聽lets people remember what聽happened while in safe surroundings can both help, but聽neither works perfectly.
A few years ago, researchers noticed that people who have experienced trauma tend to have fewer PTSD symptoms if they happen to be taking blood pressure medicines that block a聽hormone called angiotensin.
This hormone is thought to bind to receptor proteins in parts of聽the brain involved in learning. When a drug that blocks angiotensin, called losartan, was tested in mice, the animals lost fears learned in the lab, such as a fear of sounds linked to receiving an electric shock, more quickly.
Now Benjamin Becker at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and his colleagues have聽carried out a similar test in聽people. They trained 59 men to聽develop a mild fear by giving them a small electric shock whenever they were shown an image of a coloured square.
Electrodes on the participants鈥� skin showed that they soon began sweating whenever they saw the square聽鈥� a sign of fear or alertness.
The volunteers were then given聽either losartan or a placebo tablet. After 90 minutes, they were shown the square again, this聽time without shocks, so they would unlearn their fear reaction. The men who received losartan were .
An artificially created fear of a聽particular shape isn鈥檛 as severe or as complex as the symptoms of聽PTSD, but the findings are encouraging, says Paul Marvar at George Washington University in Washington DC, who is running a聽trial of losartan in people who have been diagnosed with the condition. In his study, people are聽taking the medicine alone for聽10 weeks, but another option would be to take it at the same time as having talking therapy.
Another approach for PTSD is finding ways to block the strong fearful memories from forming in the first place. Some groups are researching whether it helps to give beta-blocker drugs to people in hospital emergency rooms who have just experienced trauma.
However, if this works, beta blockers would need to be given straight after trauma, before it is聽possible to tell if someone is going to develop PTSD. As only a minority of people develop the condition, this would involve giving treatment to people unnecessarily, says Marvar.
This could be prevented if聽others are successful in developing tests to identify those who are most likely to get PTSD.
