Die Uni Basel meldet, Andreas Papassotiropoulos und Dominique de Quervain haben herausgefunden, dass ein "bekanntes Antiallergikum" (den Namen verraten sie im Communiqué natürlich nicht; im Paper steht dann, es sei der Wirkstoff Diphenhydramin), so wirkt:

Die einmalige Einnahme dieses Medikaments führte zu einer signifikanten Reduktion der Erinnerungsfähigkeit von zuvor gesehenen negativen Bildern, ohne dass dabei das Gedächtnis für neutrale oder positive Inhalte beeinflusst wurde.

Eine Anti-Bad-Memories-Pille? Die "Pille danach" bei schlechten Erlebnissen / traumatischen Erfahrungen?

Die Befunde könnten für die Behandlung der posttraumatischen Belastungsstörung von Bedeutung sein.

Unter "Conflict of Interest Statement" lesen wir beim Paper:

Conflict of interest statement: The study was done in collaboration with and was partially funded by ACImmune SA, Lausanne, Switzerland. P.P., A. Muhs, and A. Pfeifer are employees of ACImmune. A. Papassotiropoulos is scientific consultant of ACImmune. ACImmune SA and University of Basel are coapplicants. A. Papassotiropoulos and D.J.-F.d.Q. are inventors of a patent related to the use of diphenhydramine as memory modulator.

Im Kleingedruckten zu dem Paper, das die Uni Basel mit einem Communiqué feiert, erfährt man ausführlich, dass - damit's schneller geht

[To facilitate the selection of one drug for a proof-of-concept study, we studied which of the nine high priority genes are also linked to highly aversive (traumatic) memory in a population of 349 severely traumatized genocide survivors. After correction for multiple comparisons, one gene (HRH1) was found to be associated with traumatic memory. Therefore, compounds targeting the histamine 1 receptor (encoded by HRH1) were given highest priority for this proof- of-concept intervention study.]

Genetic Study in the Rwandan Sample.

We recruited 349 survivors of the Rwandan genocide (185 females and 164 males) living in the Nakivale refugee camp. Age was 34.9 ± 0.3 y (mean ± SE). As the Nakivale refugee camp has grown over the last decade and is spread over a large area, participants were sampled proportionally to the population size from each zone. To exclude genetic relatives in the samples, only one person per household was interviewed. Interviewers had been trained to detect current alcohol abuse and acute psychotic symptoms; candidates exhibiting these signs were excluded. All subjects had experienced highly aversive traumatic situations and were examined in 2006/2007 by trained experts using a structured interview based on the Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS) (9) with the help of trained interpreters. Traumatic events were assessed with a checklist of 36 war- and non–war-related traumatic event types, e.g., injury by weapon, rape, accident (2, 10). Traumatic load was estimated by assessing the number of different traumatic event types expe- rienced or witnessed. This measure is considered more reliable than assessing the frequency of traumatic events (10). Depressive symptoms were assessed with the depression section of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-D). A subset of this sample has been analyzed in previous studies (2, 11). The procedures were approved by the Ethics Committees of the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), Mbarara, Uganda. The PDS and event list were completed in the form of a stan- dardized interview. Interviewers were first trained in a 6-wk course on principles of quantitative data collection and interviewing techniques. Instruments were translated into Kinyarwanda using several steps of translations, blind back-translations, and subsequent corrections by independent groups of translators (12). Following the translations, the psychometric properties of the translated scales were investigated in a validation study including a retest spanning a 2-wk period and a crossvalidation with expert rating (13). To avoid known ceiling effects (14), subjects were selected to have experienced no more than 16 traumatic event types. Saliva samples were obtained from each person using the Oragene DNA Self-Collection Kit (DNA Genothek). DNA was extracted from saliva using standard protocols. In this sample (as was the case in the Swiss sample) we performed array-based SNP genotyping (Affymetrix 6.0 genomewide human SNP array). QC procedures were identical between samples.

2002 bereits stand übrigens in Nature (11 Jahre vor Papassotiropoulos und Dominique de Quervain et al.):

We propose that endocannabinoids facilitate extinction of aversive memories through their selective inhibitory effects on local inhibitory networks in the amygdala.

Eat this, Papassotiropoulos & de Quervain!