Reduce Fear and Traumatic Stress: New Findings Reveal Protein Synthesis Blocker Could Help

It may be possible to reduce fear and stress following a traumatic event just by providing a protein synthesis blocker to the brain. The findings could revolutionize the way researchers treat posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and similar disorders.

The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a well-known behavioral paradigm that researchers believe models PTSD in order to explore how fearful memories are formed. The scientists exposed rats to an auditory stimulus that the animals learned to associate with a mildly traumatic event. After only a single exposure to the training, the rats exhibited fear during subsequent exposures to the noise.  The researchers then gave the animals rapamycin, a protein synthesis blocker, immediately after memory was retrieved in order to control bonding between the cells in the brain. The result was that the animals were considerably less fearful when exposed to the sound the next day.

So how does rapamycin work? It reduces signal transfer between cells in the amygdala, a key brain region in fear-related behaviors. This caused the rats to be less fearful since the protein synthesis blocker kept the signal transfer at a minimum.

"This is an important basic neuroscience finding that has the potential to have clinical implications for the way individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder are treated," said Vadim Bolshakov, one of the researchers, in a press release.

In addition to providing researchers with a new way to treat PTSD, the findings also suggest that different plasticity rules within cells in the brain are recruited during the formation of the original fear memory. That said, further work still needs to be conducted at the molecular level before researchers can move forward. Yet it could provide the foundation that scientists need to help treat anxiety disorders in the future.