December 10th, 2009

Did you know that doctors have found a new way to treat phobias?

Reports the New York Times:

A new study suggests that doctors can take advantage of the brain’s natural updating process — the way it might soften its impression of, say, pit bulls after seeing a playful one — to treat phobias, post-traumatic stress and other anxiety disorders.

Therapists already treat these disorders, in part, by exposing patients in a safe environment to the sights, places or memories that they dread, in an effort to create new and more comforting associations. But the study, published Wednesday by the journal Nature, suggests that simple changes in how this therapy is applied — particularly in the timing — could have a large payoff.

The altered memories were of mild shocks in the laboratory, not of real-world traumatic events. Still, Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard who was not part of the study, called the findings impressive.

While current treatments for anxiety are effective, he wrote in an e-mail message, “the return of fear following extinction remains a problem for some patients.”

“If clinicians can map these procedures onto contemporary fear-reduction methods,” he continued, “then this will constitute a wonderful example” of research translated from the laboratory to the real world.

In the study, a research team from New York University and the University of Texas created a simple fear in 65 participants: when they saw a colored square appear on a computer screen, they got a slight electrical shock on their wrist about a third of the time — a frequency that creates a lasting association.

The next day, sure enough, the sight of the square drew an immediate emotional response, as measured by sensors on the skin. The participants were then given “extinction” training, to override the painful memories: they were repeatedly shown the colored square without the accompanying shock.

But first they were divided into three groups, with different timings and methods. In the first group, given the extinction training just 10 minutes after being reminded of the painful memory, subjects no longer reacted emotionally to the sight of the colored square — their fear was gone. And there was no trace of it a year later, the study found.

The same could not be said for the other groups. Participants who received extinction training six hours after being reminded of the shocks, and those who were not first shown the square to remind them of the fearful memory, still showed a physiological dread at the sight of the square. The extinction training had failed.

Find out more at the NYT.