Minus the fear: The new treatment could help treat disabling phobias as well as post-traumatic stress disorder, say researchers.
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One month later, the team tested again to see if the fear had re-emerged. It hadn't. What's more, the rats took longer to reacquire the fear than control rats that were learning to fear the sound for the first time.
"This suggests that [the sound] is now associated with safety [by the treated rats]," Monfils told Cosmos Online.
"These findings are extremely significant," said Merel Kindt, a clinical psychologist from the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. "If this procedure turns out to be effective in humans, this may be a promising alternative for the treatment of anxiety disorders."
The team are already working closely with researchers on human fear. "We are all definitely eager to extend our findings to humans," said Monfils, "but we will proceed cautiously. One big advantage of testing this protocol in humans will be that we will be able to ask them questions about what they explicitly remember."
