To sleep, perchance to forget fears

Traumatic memories can be manipulated in sleeping mice to reduce their fearful responses during waking hours. The finding, announced by Stanford University researchers at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, suggests that sleep-based therapies could provide new options for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“We have an ethical obligation to study this because PTSD is so hard to treat,” says Daniela Schiller of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, who studies the human neurobiology of fear and was not involved in the study. “It’s definitely promising,” she says.

Currently, one of the most common treatments for PTSD requires the patient to recall the original trauma — an explosion, for example — in a psychiatrist’s office. With repeated ‘safe’ exposures to the memory, patients may learn new associations that reduce the power of loud noises and other cues to trigger flashbacks.

Some patients are daunted by the task of intentionally recalling their traumatic memories. And many patients who undergo the therapy eventually relapse, says lead author Asya Rolls, perhaps because the technique becomes strongly associated with the psychiatrist’s office and does not generalize well to the outside world.

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http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/10/to-sleep-perchance-to-forget-fears.html