With the "Age of Biotechnology" rapidly advancing, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed the funding of research to experiment with the effectiveness of the drug propranolol for individuals who had just undergone a traumatic event at the Massachusetts General Hospital, which began in late 2004.
The study was set up to assess any reduction in the incidence and the severity of post-traumatic stress disorder after such a traumatic incident.
However, ABC News reports that the President's Council on Biothetics condemned any such memory-altering research.
Yet, the principal investigator of the study, Roger K. Pitman, MD, who is a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, says that he has also received a grant from the Army to start similar research with the veterans of Iraq, also according to a report by ABC News.
According to Felicia Cohn, who is a medical ethicist at the University of California at Irvine's School of Medicine, "It becomes a genie in the bottle question. Once a drug is available for use, it gets used appropriately and inappropriately," reports ABC news.
The experiment drug being utilized, propranolol was not originally intended for this type of treatment. The drug was originally developed to treat high blood pressure. It was found that it also may effectively help erase painful memories from the past.
Pittman explained to ABC News that "there is a period of time after you first learn something before it's retained," which ... is called consolidation."
"That's why you remember what you were doing the morning of Sept. 11, better than August 11," adds Pitman.
The process of the brain stores the memory of the traumatic even and altering the recall of this event is being studied with "reconsolidation," which is the "window of opportunity" to alter this memory with drugs when the memory is recalled again.
Colleagues agree that there is evidence to back up this research in experiments conducted on rats. More research must be conducted to determine the effectiveness of drug usage to stop the processing of memory recalls. A lot is still unknown in the research of how the brain works in this processing.
However, "researchers have discovered that certain drugs can interrupt that process," according to ABC News.
"This is all very preliminary," said Dr. Roger Pitman, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist. "We're just getting started. There is some promising preliminary data but no conclusions."
Pitman's preliminary research has been ongoing for several years and the data are not yet conclusive, but he states that so far his studies are promising.
