Three months later, the patients listened to tapes describing their traumatic events. Dr. Nader found that the people on propranolol had fewer stress symptoms than those on the dummy pills.
But for many PTSD sufferers the trauma might have occurred years before. "If you reactivate the trauma in somebody who has PTSD and that memory returns back to an (unstable) state, then maybe it means that memory can be manipulated," Dr. Nader said.
Dr. Pitman and Dr. Nader, along with colleague Alain Brunet of McGill University have recruited around 20 people in the Montreal area who were traumatized as long as 20 or 30 years ago by child abuse, sexual assault or accidents. Traumatic memories will be brought to the front of their minds by talking to counsellors. This enables these memories to be modified by drugs before being stored again.
"The thing we're working on now is to have people who already have PTSD recall their memories and thereafter give them propranolol to reduce the restoring of those memories, so the memory gets stored in a weaker version than it was orig-inally stored in," Dr. Pitman said.
But deleting memories is not the aim of this particular project because, for many PTSD sufferers, the bad memories are part of their identity. "What we want to do is turn it down a bit so it's not so overwhelming and bring them into a range where they're responsive to the traditional ways of treatment -- therapy and psychiatric treatment," Dr. Nader said.
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