As humans, we depend on our memory in all aspects of life. Whether it’s for safety, like walking carefully on an icy patch, or recalling facts during an exam, memory guides us through each lived scenario and the emotions that accompany it. In the field of neuroscience, it is a widely known and proven phenomena that an experience eliciting a highly emotional response, is an experience that is more likely to be recalled. Evolutionarily, this is beneficial as it allowed organisms to develop survival tactics and stay clear of situations that once made them afraid or disturbed. But today, we are beginning to see these mechanisms play out in an unfavorable way, as negative memories manifest through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, in cognitive beings. In fact, an average 6% of Americans experience PTSD from a wide array of traumatic events each year, according to the US Department of Veteran affairs.
In a 2021 study published by Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers analyzed if the depiction of mass traumatic events in the news or on social media were associated with higher burden PTSD. It was found that those viewing traumatic events for longer periods of time, were 269% more likely to have increased PTSD prevalence (3.5% vs. 1.3%). With the increasing number of both adults and children on social media experiencing constant access to traumatic events happening all over the country, psychiatrists are worried that communal PTSD levels will begin to rise. But thanks to neuroscientists around the world, the mechanisms by which PSTD acts are starting to be identified, in hopes of halting these pessimistic memories that live at the front of so many minds.
Dr. Stephanie Grella, principal investigator and professor at Loyola University Chicago, has long worked on identifying the cellular circuits that are involved during memory recall to develop strategies that may disrupt these memory engrams. Grella’s lab works on the principal of tagging memory engrams during fear conditioning, and later reactivating these memories via optogenetics. In a 2022 publication in Nature Communications, she tested to see if optical stimulation of a competing positive memory during reconsolidation of the fear memory would alter the magnitude of this fear memory. Results show that this interference of a positive memory did help to counteract the aversive state. As explained, Dr. Grella’s goal in altering PTSD would be to disrupt the memory before it even becomes reconsolidated. Although proved to be effective in mice, this procedure only provides steps in the right direction to the ultimate goal of treating PTSD from a cellular level in humans. It is nearly impossible to place humans in a positive setting while a fearful memory is being reconsolidated, yet this work sets a foundation for how malleable memories are, and how we can use this to our advantage in the future while attempting to treat PTSD.
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