Is The Ability To Extinguish Fear Impaired By Antidepressants?

Is The Ability To Extinguish Fear Impaired By Antidepressants?

An entertaining new report of animal research published in Biological Psychiatry suggests that -place antidepressant medications may impair a cast of learning that is important clinically.

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly called SSRIs, are a rank of antidepressant widely used to discourse depression, as well as a class of anxiety disorders, but the effects of these drugs on learning and remembrance are poorly understood.

In a preceding study, Nesha Burghardt, then a mark with degrees student at New York University, and her colleagues demonstrated that long-winded-term SSRI treatment impairs fear conditioning in rats. As a come-up, they have now tested the goods of antidepressant treatment on extinction learning in rats using auditory fear conditioning, a image of fear learning that involves the amygdala. The amygdala is a locality of the brain vitally important the sake of processing memory and emotion.

They rest that long-term, but not uncivil-term, SSRI treatment impairs extinction scholarship, which is the ability to learn that a conditioned encouragement no longer predicts an aversive occurrence.

"This impairment may have important consequences clinically, from that time extinction-based exposure therapy is repeatedly used to treat anxiety disorders and antidepressants are repeatedly administered simultaneously," said Dr. Burghardt. "Based put our work, medication-induced impairments in extinguishment learning may actually disrupt the beneficial personal estate of exposure-therapy."

This finding is harmonious with the results of several clinical studies showing that combined management can impede the benefits of exposing therapy or even natural resilience to the stroke of traumatic stress at long-time follow-up.

The authors also suggest a mechanism for this effect forward fear learning. They reported that the antidepressants decreased the levels of single of the subunits of the NMDA receptor (NR2B) in the amygdala. The NMDA receptor is critically involved in dismay-related learning, so these reductions are believed to grant to the observed effects.

Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, commented, "We perceive that antidepressants play important roles in the handling of depression and anxiety disorders. However, it is significant to understand the limitations of these medications in the same state that we can improve the effectiveness of the usage for these disorders."