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A CURE FOR PTSD? SCIENTISTS THINK SOLUTION IS A
GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP -- "I've been told never to
say
cure in psychiatric medicine. But significant
amelioration
of symptoms could be on the horizon."
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Cure for post-traumatic stress?
Scientists think solution is a good night’s sleep
BY MEG MCEVOY
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a well-known illness: A
traumatizing event happens to someone and they experience trouble
sleeping, memory loss and trouble learning new things. But researchers
at UVA recently got a grant to explore what they think may be a fix for
PTSD.
“I’ve been told never to say ‘cure’ in psychiatric medicine,” says Dr.
William B. Levy, whose systems neurodynamics lab will perform the
studies. But Levy says significant “amelioration of symptoms” could be
on the horizon.
So how would it work? Scientists have long observed that the amygdala is
the brain structure responsible for fear, and is presumably also
responsible for the fear that’s re-experienced by patients with PTSD.
But Levy and his researchers think a totally different structure also
plays a role in PTSD.
That structure is the hippocampus, which most scientists agree is
responsible for encoding memories. In normal functioning, the
hippocampus “sends” memories to the neocortex, where they become
“declarative,” or explicit memories that people can access and talk
about.
A case study brought to Levy’s attention by one of his students showed
that people with PTSD weren’t processing their memories this way. Take
the case of a woman who had been raped in an alley: She had no explicit
memory of ever having been in the alley, but when investigators took her
there, she had a strong emotional response.
To Levy, this indicated not only a fear response in the amygdala, but
also that the hippocampus had not done its job in producing explicit
memories in the neocortex. Why not?
Because part of the hippocampus’ encoding process happens at night,
during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep cycles. But, people with PTSD
commonly have trouble sleeping and wake up from nightmares, which “would
ruin the encoding that the hippocampus was trying to accomplish,” Levy
says. “It’s pretty obvious—all these people need is a good night’s
sleep.”
Unfortunately, most of the anti-depressants used to treat PTSD are
REM-inhibitors, meaning they’ll put a patient out, but the quality of
sleep is decreased.
But Levy’s researchers also discovered that a depression drug that’s
related to Prozac, nefazodone, was actually offering PTSD patients the
REM sleep they were looking for. Levy has been awarded a grant from the
National Institute of Health to create a computer program to reproduce
sleep and dreaming in a computer model of a brain. Through this, Levy
hopes to create a drug for PTSD that’s not just a “happenstance”
treatment.
Given the high number of traumatic events occurring, not to mention
veterans coming back from the Iraq war, a cure for post-traumatic stress
disorder would likely make big waves in the science world.
“When we see we can help, of course we want to help,” Levy says. “It’s
clearly our responsibility to make our research relevant.”
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Larry Scott --
