An Experiment in Curing Anxiety Disorders and Panic Attacks

The treatment of Anxiety Disorders and Panic Attacks has engaged many doctors and researchers with mixed success, but some experiments on rats have given some useful pointers to the use of the Amygdala Gland and how it can be re-programmed to alleviate anxiety disorders and panic attacks.

Researchers who were funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered a new high tech way to quell panic in rats. They have detected the brain's equivalent of an 'all clear' signal, that, when simulated, reduces the effects of fear, and can even eliminate it altogether. This discovery could lead to physiological treatments for extreme fear responses seen in anxiety disorders that would not require any medication.

Rats normally freeze with fear when they hear a tone they have been conditioned to associate with an electric shock. Dr. Gregory Quirk and Mohammed Milad, from the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico, have now demonstrated that stimulating a part of the front area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex, extinguishes this fear response by mimicking the brain's own safety signal. They report on their findings in the November 7, 2002 issue of the Nature publication.

Dr Quirk explained that repeated exposure to traumatic reminders without any adverse consequences causes those fear responses to gradually disappear. This reduction of fear appears to be an active rather than passive process, So it doesn't erase the fear association from memory, but generates a new memory for safety purposes

The researchers recorded electrical activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex as rats were fear-conditioned by teaching them to fear a sound by repeatedly pairing it with an electrical shock. Then they abolished this conditioned fear by presenting the sound without the shock; the animals no longer froze when they heard the tone. The part of the brain that was conditioned to stop the anxiety is the Amygdala Gland, and this treatment has been found to be very successful in treating anxiety and panic attacks in humans.

Anxiety and Panic Attacks can be very effectively cured by re-programming the Amygdala gland, and the treatment can be self-administered. See http://www.Cure-Panic-Attack.com for details and interviews with the author of the system.

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