According to a research conducted by the UT Southwestern Medical Center with mice, body’s natural stress hormone can prove to be a beneficial option in lastingly minimizing the fearful response of a traumatic memory.
It was found that when Corticosterone was administered to the mice, enhancements of new memories took place to fight against the fearful traumatic memories of the past in order to minimize the negative emotional significance of traumatic memories.
From Bio-Medicine.Org:
Days after experiencing a traumatic event – a mild electrical shock – mice in the study still showed a fearful response when re-exposed to the place where it happened, a condition that could be a model for post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. But mice receiving the hormone corticosterone at the time they “relived” the event experienced a significant drop in that fear.
“Corticosterone appears to enhance new memories that compete with the fearful memory thereby decreasing its negative emotional significance,” said Dr. Craig Powell, senior author and assistant professor of neurology and psychiatry at UT Southwestern. “When an animal or human is exposed to or relives an aversive scenario, a process called extinction creates a competing memory.”
“We’re not erasing memories,” said Dr. Robert Greene, professor of psychiatry at UT Southwestern and another author of the study. “What the steroid does is attenuate the fear memory by helping the mice to learn that these contexts should no longer be perceived as dangerous.”
This study, based on a mechanism called extinction, revealed that memory tends to diminish on a gradual basis and can be restored with a marginal reminder of the original event. It was also learnt that glucocorticoids can help in specifically increasing extinction of the feared memory.
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