February 11, 2009 5:43 PM
- Text
A Pill To Forget?
Pitman figured he could block that cycle by giving trauma victims propranolol right away ... before adrenaline could make the memories too strong. He started recruiting patients for a small pilot study. One of the first was Kathleen Logue, a paralegal who had been knocked down in the middle of a busy Boston street by a bicyclist.
"He just hit the whole left side of my body. And it seemed like forever that I was laying in the middle of State Street, downtown Boston," Logue remembers.
She says she was terrified that she was just going to get run over.
As part of the study, Logue took propranolol four times a day for 10 days. Like the others who got the drug, three months later she showed no physiological signs of PTSD, while several subjects who got a placebo did. Those results got Pitman funding for a larger study by the National Institutes of Health.
But then the President's Council on Bioethics condemned the study in a report that said our memories make us who we are and that "re-writing" memories pharmacologically … risks "undermining our true identity."
"This is a quote. 'It risks making shameful acts seem less shameful or terrible acts less terrible than they really are,'" Stahl reads to Logue.
"A terrible act," she replies. "Why should you have to live with it every day of your life? It doesn't erase the fact that it happened. It doesn't erase your memory of it. It makes it easier to remember and function."
David Magnus, director of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics, says he worries that it won't be just trauma victims trying to dull painful memories.
"From the point of view of a pharmaceutical industry, they're going to have every interest in having as many people as possible diagnosed with this condition and have it used as broadly as possible. That's the reality of how drugs get introduced and utilized," Magnus argues.
He's concerned it will be used for trivial reasons. "If I embarrass myself at a party Friday night and instead of feeling bad about it I could take a pill then I'm going to avoid – not have to avoid making a fool of myself at parties," Magnus says.
"So you think that that embarrassment and all of that is teaching us?" Stahl asks.
"Absolutely," Magnus says. "Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people."
But while the ethicists debate the issue, the science is moving forward. Researchers have shown in rat studies that propranolol can also blunt old memories.
Pitman wondered: Could it work in humans? He teamed up with Canadian colleague Alain Brunet, who searched for people with long-standing PTSD, like Rita Magil. She had suffered for three years from nightmares after a life-threatening car accident.
Another study subject is Louise O'Donnell-Jasmin, who was raped by a doctor at the age of 12. "He raped me on his desk, on a chair, and on the floor. It, for me, it was like I was dying inside," she remembers. "The world had ended."
O'Donnell-Jasmin was haunted by the rape for more than 30 years. She never felt comfortable undressing in front of her husband and suffered from recurrent flashbacks and nightmares.
The study was simple: Subjects came in and were asked to think about and write down every detail they could remember about their trauma; in Magil's case, her car accident, reactivating the memory in her brain. She was then given propranolol.
Rita says she suffered no side effects.
A week later, electrodes measured her body's stress response as she listened to a retelling of her trauma. Asked what happened, Magil says, "No reaction."
And she says she had no more nightmares.
The patient who made the most dramatic recovery turned out to be O'Donnell-Jasmin, but there's a catch, because she was in a control group and therefore wasn't supposed to improve at all.
Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. "He just hit the whole left side of my body. And it seemed like forever that I was laying in the middle of State Street, downtown Boston," Logue remembers.
She says she was terrified that she was just going to get run over.
As part of the study, Logue took propranolol four times a day for 10 days. Like the others who got the drug, three months later she showed no physiological signs of PTSD, while several subjects who got a placebo did. Those results got Pitman funding for a larger study by the National Institutes of Health.
But then the President's Council on Bioethics condemned the study in a report that said our memories make us who we are and that "re-writing" memories pharmacologically … risks "undermining our true identity."
"This is a quote. 'It risks making shameful acts seem less shameful or terrible acts less terrible than they really are,'" Stahl reads to Logue.
"A terrible act," she replies. "Why should you have to live with it every day of your life? It doesn't erase the fact that it happened. It doesn't erase your memory of it. It makes it easier to remember and function."
David Magnus, director of Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Ethics, says he worries that it won't be just trauma victims trying to dull painful memories.
"From the point of view of a pharmaceutical industry, they're going to have every interest in having as many people as possible diagnosed with this condition and have it used as broadly as possible. That's the reality of how drugs get introduced and utilized," Magnus argues.
He's concerned it will be used for trivial reasons. "If I embarrass myself at a party Friday night and instead of feeling bad about it I could take a pill then I'm going to avoid – not have to avoid making a fool of myself at parties," Magnus says.
"So you think that that embarrassment and all of that is teaching us?" Stahl asks.
"Absolutely," Magnus says. "Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people."
But while the ethicists debate the issue, the science is moving forward. Researchers have shown in rat studies that propranolol can also blunt old memories.
Pitman wondered: Could it work in humans? He teamed up with Canadian colleague Alain Brunet, who searched for people with long-standing PTSD, like Rita Magil. She had suffered for three years from nightmares after a life-threatening car accident.
Another study subject is Louise O'Donnell-Jasmin, who was raped by a doctor at the age of 12. "He raped me on his desk, on a chair, and on the floor. It, for me, it was like I was dying inside," she remembers. "The world had ended."
O'Donnell-Jasmin was haunted by the rape for more than 30 years. She never felt comfortable undressing in front of her husband and suffered from recurrent flashbacks and nightmares.
The study was simple: Subjects came in and were asked to think about and write down every detail they could remember about their trauma; in Magil's case, her car accident, reactivating the memory in her brain. She was then given propranolol.
Rita says she suffered no side effects.
A week later, electrodes measured her body's stress response as she listened to a retelling of her trauma. Asked what happened, Magil says, "No reaction."
And she says she had no more nightmares.
The patient who made the most dramatic recovery turned out to be O'Donnell-Jasmin, but there's a catch, because she was in a control group and therefore wasn't supposed to improve at all.
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