Could a pill overwrite negative memories?

At the University of Montreal, researchers claim to have found a pill that may erase bad memories.

I spoke with researcher Marie-France Marin, a doctoral student at The Center for Studies on Human Street at the University of Montreal. Below is an excerpt of our conversation.

SP: What were your findings during the course of the study?

We recruited 33 participants. They were all men in this case, and we asked them to come for three visits at the lab. At the first visit, we showed them a slideshow. The slideshow consisted of eleven sides, accompanied by narration, and there were neutral and negative segments in the slideshow. It was basically the story of a little girl who goes to her grandparent’s house, and they decide to build a bird house. At some point she cuts her hand on a saw, and a slide was shown to participants of the little girl's mangled hand.

So we let the memory settle in the brain. We had one group taking metryapone, another group being given a double dosage, and the last group being given a placebo. We waited another four days, until after the drug had left their system. We found that the men in the group who received two doses of metyrapone were impaired when retrieving the negative events of the story, while they showed no impairment recalling the neutral parts of the story. We were surprised that the decreased memory of negative information were still present once cortisol levels had returned to normal. Our findings may help people deal with traumatic events by offering them the opportunity to make over the emotional part of their memories during therapy.

SP: How does metyrapone work?

Metyrapone is a drug that significantly decreases the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that is involved in memory recall.

SP: How do you see metyrapone being used in the future?

Obviously with the results we have obtained, we see a lot of potential implication for clinical conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. However, before moving to the clinical population, I think that more questions need to be answered.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com