Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2016
How Administration of the Beta-Blocker Propranolol Before Extinction can Prevent the Return of Fear.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Modulating Cognitive Function with Antihypertensive Medications: a Comprehensive Systematic Review On FMRI Studies.Clinical neuroradiology · 2025Pooled it
- Functional brain changes after alternative pharmacological interventions in posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of clinical trials.Brain and behavior · 2023Pooled it
- A systematic review of the pharmacological modulation of autobiographical memory specificity.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- A translational perspective on neural circuits of fear extinction: Current promises and challenges.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2018Pooled it
- Impairing memory reconsolidation with propranolol in healthy and clinical samples: a meta-analysis.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNPooled it
- Neural substrates of propranolol-induced impairments in the reconsolidation of nicotine-associated memories in smokers.Translational psychiatry · 2021Trial
- Acute stress leaves fear generalization in healthy individuals intact.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Role of Human Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Learning and Recall of Enhanced Extinction.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2019Trial
- A systematic review of spontaneous recovery in human fear conditioning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- The locus coeruleus influences behavior by coordinating effective integration of fear memories and sensory input.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- The impact of extinction timing on pre-extinction arousal and subsequent return of fear.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Propranolol versus Other Selected Drugs in the Treatment of Various Types of Anxiety or Stress, with Particular Reference to Stage Fright and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- Rewarded Extinction Increases Amygdalar Connectivity and Stabilizes Long-Term Memory Traces in the vmPFC.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Propranolol Administration Modulates Neural Activity in the Hippocampal Hilus During Fear Retrieval.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Unrelenting Fear Under Stress: Neural Circuits and Mechanisms for the Immediate Extinction Deficit.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Review
- Memory ModulationFrontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Propranolol Decreases Fear Expression by Modulating Fear Memory Traces.Biological psychiatry · 2021Article
- Propranolol-induced inhibition of unconditioned stimulus-reactivated fear memory prevents the return of fear in humans.Translational psychiatry · 2020Article
- Investigating the efficacy of the reminder-extinction procedure to disrupt contextual threat memories in humans using immersive Virtual Reality.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Patients with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex lesions are capable of discriminatory threat learning but appear impaired in cognitive regulation of subjective fear.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Combining beta-blockers with exposure therapy has been advocated to reduce fear, yet experimental studies combining beta-blockers with memory reactivation have had contradictory results. We explored how beta-blockade might affect the course of safety learning and the subsequent return of fear in a double-blind placebo-controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging study in humans (N=46). A single dose of propranolol before extinction learning caused a loss of conditioned fear responses, and prevented the subsequent return of fear and decreased explicit memory for the fearful events in the absence of drug. Fear-related neural responses were persistently attenuated in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), increased in the hippocampus 24 h later, and correlated with individual behavioral indices of fear. Prediction error-related responses in the ventral striatum persisted during beta-blockade. We suggest that this pattern of results is most consistent with a model where beta-blockade can prevent the return of fear by (i) reducing retrieval of fear memory, via the dmPFC and (ii) increasing contextual safety learning, via the hippocampus. Our findings suggest that retrieval of fear memory and contextual safety learning form potential mnemonic target mechanisms to optimize exposure-based therapy with beta-blockers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.