Common Antidepressants May Lessen Possible Benefits of Therapy

First Posted: Jun 10, 2013 11:02 AM EDT
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A new study shows that antidepressants may impair the ability to extinguish fear.

The study notes that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly referred to as SSRIs, are a commonly used antidepressant used to treat depression and a broad range of anxiety disorders. However, the effects of these drugs can be harmful to learning and memory.

According to a press release, graduate student at New York University Nesha Burghardt looked at long-term SSRI treatment and how it impairs fear in rats using auditory fear condition or a model of fear learning that involves the amygdala.

This part of the brain, an almond shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the brain, is responsible for emotions and motivations, and invoking many feelings including arousal, autonomic responses associated with fear, emotional responses, hormonal secretions and memory.

The study showed that in long-term cases, SSRI treatment can impair extinction learning, which is the ability to learn when a conditioned stimulus no longer predicts an aversive event. However, short-term SSRI had no affect.

"This impairment may have important consequences clinically, since extinction-based exposure therapy is often used to treat anxiety disorders and antidepressants are often administered simultaneously," said Burghardt, according to the release. "Based on our work, medication-induced impairments in extinction learning may actually disrupt the beneficial effects of exposure-therapy."

The results are similar to other studies that show a combined treatment can impede the benefits of exposure therapy or even natural resilience to the impact of traumatic stress with long-term follow-up.

The findings for the study can be found in the journal of Biological Psychiatry

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