WASHINGTON — Science is getting a grip on people’s fears, and researchers hope advances could lead to treatments for a major medical problem: When irrational fears go haywire.
Fear is a basic primal emotion that is key to evolutionary survival. It’s one we share with animals. Genetics as well as traumatic events play a big role in the development of overwhelming — and needless — fear, psychologists say.
“Fear is the most powerful emotion,” said University of California, Los Angeles, psychology professor Michael Fanselow.
“Fear is a funny thing,” said Ted Abel, a fear researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “One needs enough of it, but not too much of it.”
About 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A Harvard Medical School study estimated the annual cost to the U.S. economy in 1999 at roughly $42 billion.
Scientists figure they can improve that fear-dampening process by learning how fear runs through the brain and body.
The fear hot spot is the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain.
The amygdala isn’t responsible for all of people’s fear response, but it’s like the burglar alarm that connects to everything else, said New York University psychology and neural science professor Elizabeth Phelps.
Emory University psychiatry and psychology professor Michael Davis found that a certain chemical reaction in the amygdala is crucial in the way mice and people learn to overcome fear.
Scientists found D-cycloserine, a drug already used to fight hard-to-treat tuberculosis, strengthens that good chemical reaction in mice. Working in combination with therapy, it seems to do the same in people. It was first shown effective with people who have a fear of heights. It also worked in tests with other types of fear, and it’s now being studied in survivors of the World Trade Center attacks and the Iraq war.
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