Hot Toys November 2009
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What if you could erase all those bad memories, memories of fear and perhaps the traumatic experiences of your divorce? A team of researchers in Switzerland claims to have found the proteins that safeguard those memories – and a way to potentially erase those memories.
I have to admit that this article slipped below my radar, but a recent note of a website that keeps track of significant medical research stressed the importance of this discovery.
Scientists at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, claim that the use of a drug can wipe certain memories from your brain.
The research, based on mice, showed that proteins known as extracellular matrix chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans form neural nets that protect memories of “fear” to be erased. When given a drug called chondroitinase ABC, fear memories were much more likely to disappear than in those mice that did not receive treatment.
There was no information how those mice relate to humans and how the researchers determined whether certain memories were erased. However, members of Faculty1000, said they evaluated the findings and were able to confirm them. The conclusion is that the discovery may provide a solution to anxiety disorders, as it could allow doctors to erase the memories of patients who have had extremely traumatic experiences.
In his review for F1000 Medicine, David Wolfer said, “The identification of cellular mechanisms that … control the stability of fear memories is extremely important for the development of new and better therapies for anxiety disorders”. The article was also evaluated by Gregory Quirk, an anxiety disorders expert, who said, “Once we know how perineuronal nets are regulated, it may be possible to … allow fears in adults to be erased by extinction-based therapies.”
The original article entitled “Perineuronal nets protect fear memories from erasure” was published in the September 4 2009 issue of Science.
