Prazosin during threat discrimination boosts memory of the safe stimulus
- Philipp Homan1,
- Qi Lin1,
- James W. Murrough1,2,
- Laili Soleimani1,
- Dominik R. Bach3,
- Roger L. Clem2 and
- Daniela Schiller1,2
- 1Department of Psychiatry and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York 10029, USA
- 2Department of Neuroscience and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York 10029, USA
- 3Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, University of Zurich, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland
- Corresponding author: daniela.schiller{at}mssm.edu
Abstract
The α-1 adrenoreceptor antagonist prazosin has shown promise in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, but its mechanisms are not well understood. Here we administered prazosin or placebo prior to threat conditioning (day 1) and tested subsequent extinction (day 2) and reextinction (day 3) in healthy human participants. Prazosin did not affect threat conditioning but augmented stimulus discrimination during extinction and reextinction, via lower responding to the safe stimulus. These results suggest that prazosin during threat acquisition may have influenced encoding or consolidation of safety processing in particular, subsequently leading to enhanced discrimination between the safe and threatening stimuli.
Footnotes
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[Supplemental material is available for this article.]
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.045898.117.
- Received May 9, 2017.
- Accepted July 10, 2017.
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