Trial reportPsychoneuroendocrinology2017
Dexamethasone facilitates fear extinction and safety discrimination in PTSD: A placebo-controlled, double-blind study.
Trial report in Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 2 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
27 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impaired learning, memory, and extinction in posttraumatic stress disorder: translational meta-analysis of clinical and preclinical studies.Translational psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Randomized controlled experimental study of hydrocortisone and D-cycloserine effects on fear extinction in PTSD.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Trial
- Psychophysiological treatment outcomes: Corticotropin-releasing factor type 1 receptor antagonist increases inhibition of fear-potentiated startle in PTSD patients.Psychophysiology · 2020Trial
- Cortisol Imbalance and Fear Learning in PTSD: Therapeutic Approaches to Control Abnormal Fear Responses.Current neuropharmacology · 2025Review
- Neurogenesis-dependent remodeling of hippocampal circuits reduces PTSD-like behaviors in adult mice.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- HIV status affects PTSD symptom severity, psychophysiology, and heart rate variability in women with low but not high exposure to childhood maltreatment.Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2024Article
- HIV Interacts with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder to Impact Fear Psychophysiology in Trauma-Exposed Black Women.Women's health reports (New Rochelle, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Steroids for the Treatment of Misophonia and Misokinesia.Case reports in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Pre-Learning Stress That Is Temporally Removed from Acquisition Impairs Fear Learning.Biology · 2023Article
- Alleviating anxiety and taming trauma: Novel pharmacotherapeutics for anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- Stress circuitry: mechanisms behind nervous and immune system communication that influence behavior.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Enhancing Fear Extinction: Pharmacological Approaches.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Understanding Human Fear Extinction: Insights from Psychophysiology.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Childhood Maltreatment in Females Is Associated with Enhanced Fear Acquisition and an Overgeneralization of Fear.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Blood levels of T-Cell Receptor Excision Circles (TRECs) provide an index of exposure to traumatic stress in mice and humans.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- The glucocorticoid footprint on the memory engram.Current opinion in endocrine and metabolic research · 2022Article
- Time of trauma prospectively affects PTSD symptom severity: The impact of circadian rhythms and cortisol.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2022Article
- Pharmacological Implications of Adjusting Abnormal Fear Memory: Towards the Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Imaging brain cortisol regulation in PTSD with a target for 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type 1.The Journal of clinical investigation · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Psychophysiological hallmarks of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) include exaggerated fear responses, impaired inhibition and extinction of conditioned fear, and decreased discrimination between safety and fear cues. This increased fear load associated with PTSD can be a barrier to effective therapy thus indicating the need for new treatments to reduce fear expression in people with PTSD. One potential biological target for reducing fear expression in PTSD is the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is dysregulated in PTSD. Recent translational rodent studies and cross-sectional clinical studies have shown that dexamethasone administration and the resulting suppression of cortisol in individuals with PTSD leads to a decrease in the fear responses characteristic of PTSD. These data, taken together, suggest that dexamethasone may serve as a novel pharmacologic intervention for heightened fear responses in PTSD. We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to test our hypothesis that dexamethasone administration and the concomitant suppression of HPA axis hyperactivity would attenuate fear expression and enhance fear extinction in individuals with PTSD. Study participants (n=62) were recruited from Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Participants were randomized to receive dexamethasone or placebo prior to fear conditioning and extinction, in a counterbalanced design (treatments separated by a week). Both PTSD- (n=37) and PTSD+ (n=25) participants showed significant startle increases in the presence of the danger signal during placebo and dexamethasone treatments (all p<0.05). However, only PTSD- control participants showed decreases in fear-potentiated startle across extinction blocks during both conditions (p's≤0.001), with PTSD+ participants showing deficits in fear extinction and safety discrimination in the placebo condition. Notably, extinction and discrimination deficits in PTSD+ subjects were markedly reversed with dexamethasone (p<0.001). These data suggest that dexamethasone may serve as a pharmacological agent with which to facilitate fear extinction and discrimination in individuals with PTSD.
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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.