New Study Finds a Potential Therapy for Anxiety Disorder

Helen Holmes February 22, 2013

Scopolamine, a drug that is widely used to treat a variety of conditions, such as nausea and motion sickness, can also be used to address anxiety disorder, a new study suggests.

The report which was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry found that the said drug has the ability to enhance the effects of exposure therapy which is the standard treatment for people with severe anxiety. In such therapy, the patient is repeatedly exposed to the object or situation that triggers their anxiety until their fear subsides. Also known as ‘memory fear extinction’, the problem with exposure therapy is that memories formed by the patient through it tend to be weak as they are tied to non-dangerous contexts. Thus, the rate of relapse is relatively high. The lead author Michael Fanselow said the disadvantage of exposure therapy is that it is a highly dependent on the environment or context in it occurs. So during real life situation, the patient still experiences anxiety when faced with his or her trigger. Fanselow is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ground-breaking Findings

For their study, the team tried to target the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the therapy by using an approach that unbinds memory extinction from its contextual bond using scopolamine. In their experiment on mice, the researchers discovered that the drug blocks the cholinergic transmission which in turn prevents contextual processing. By administering low doses of scopolamine, the mice were able to reduce their fears even without having to depend on the environment.

According to Fanselow, their study provides evidence that changing the nature of extinction learning, rather than its magnitude, produces profound improvements in the prevention of relapse. Their ground-breaking research suggests that scopolamine can be an effective pharmacological aid to exposure therapy.

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Source of this article:

UCLA life scientists identify drug that could aid treatment of anxiety disorders