PTSD Researchers already know how to forget with lab rats

PTSD Researchers already know how to forget with lab rats
Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
January 31, 2014

New rodent lab at Detrick could advance PTSD research, but by even thinking it is new proves that too many researchers all ready know how to forget what they do not want to remember.

Center for Environmental Health Research’s newest lab. Called a vivarium, the 2,145-square-foot space will be used to house up to 4,000 mice or 900 rats for research and observation.

In an ever growing list of wasted funds the military is repeating what has already been done. This time at a cost of $2 million to start another rat study on PTSD. Rats? Yes, rats. In one of the first studies reported since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars there was this report.

Last year, in a landmark experiment in rats, LeDoux opened a path to doing just that. He showed that it's possible to obstruct the memory of a specific traumatic event without affecting other memories. He also demonstrated that when the memory was stifled, the fear it roused vanished as well.

When was that report released? 2007!

Even that research was a repeat of what was done before.

"United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It's a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation as a means of treating post-traumatic stress disorder. But some military research has moved in another direction entirely.

In the 1980s, researchers found that even low-level exposure to a beam of electrons caused rats to forget what had just happened to them (an effect known as retrograde amnesia — the other version, anteretrograde amnesia, is when you can't form new memories). The same effect was also achieved with X-rays. The time factor was not large — it only caused memory loss about the previous four seconds — but the effect was intriguing."

They tried this in 2008

Cognitive restructuring, which entails rebuilding the thoughts and responses to a traumatic event to be more accurate and beneficial for the patient, is one common form of therapy to help prevent PTSD in those with acute stress. Exposure therapy is another therapy used to this end in which the patient is re-exposed in some way to the source of the trauma, in the hopes of habituating the patient and thus decreasing the response. There is some evidence that many clinicians do not use the latter form of therapy because it can cause distress for recent survivors of trauma.

Magnets to treat PTSD was yet another research project. "The treatment could blunt the effects of PTSD by strengthening the synaptic connectivity between patients' prefrontal cortex -- the region of the brain responsible for more logical thinking -- and their amygdala -- the region of the brain that processes the deep emotions associated with PTSD, Zangen said."

This also came out in 2008

"The Army and the National Institute of Mental Health have begun a five-year, $50 million research program into the factors behind soldier suicides and how to prevent them, Army Secretary Pete Geren told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday. Geren said the new partnership with NIMH, the Army Science Board and the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs would build on work that already is under way to conduct the most far-reaching and comprehensive research project ever undertaken on suicide and its prevention."

Studies using Ecstasy trials for combat stress came out in 2005 but studies using LSD started long before. Treating trauma connected to war is not new and has not improved enough simply because researchers failed to use findings from long ago.

Since the First World War the medical and psychiatric profession has mobilized to treat the psychological trauma suffered by participants of war. Initially the military and the mental health profession considered military psychiatry to have two important roles in a war setting. The first was to treat soldiers who suffered a mental breakdown as a result of combat and when possible, return them to their units as quickly as possible. The second and equally important - and infinitely more difficult - job of the psychiatric profession was to aid the military in preventing combat related mental trauma. Through intense study, first-hand experience, and trial and error mental health professionals learned over the course of the twentieth century effective ways to treat and sometimes prevent severe traumatic breakdown.

This is about WWII

Shades of Gray (ca.1940s) WW2 Shell Shock Film
Oct 26, 2013
This is a rare film on the subject of shell shock.
Shades of Gray (1940s) - This is a dramatized documentary on the subject of being shell-shocked and seems to be geared towards psychologists.

So now comes yet another waste of time and money to study rats and getting them to forget. Seems that researchers should study why they have forgotten everything. Suicides tied to military service keep going up even as they do more.