Trial reportNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2018
Neural Underpinnings of Cortisol Effects on Fear Extinction.
Trial report in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
36 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 84 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review of the pharmacological modulation of autobiographical memory specificity.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Associations between brain activity and endogenous and exogenous cortisol - A systematic review.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2020Pooled it
- Navigating the garden of forking paths for data exclusions in fear conditioning research.eLife · 2019Pooled it
- A translational perspective on neural circuits of fear extinction: Current promises and challenges.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2018Pooled 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
- Accelerated forgetting of a trauma-like event in healthy men and women after a single dose of hydrocortisone.Translational psychiatry · 2022Trial
- Altered relationship between cortisol response to social stress and mediotemporal function during fear processing in people at clinical high risk for psychosis: a preliminary report.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2022Trial
- Acute stress leaves fear generalization in healthy individuals intact.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Trial
- L-DOPA improves extinction memory retrieval after successful fear extinction.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Cortisol administration after extinction in a fear-conditioning paradigm with traumatic film clips prevents return of fear.Translational psychiatry · 2019Trial
- Sweetening fear exposure: study protocol for a multi-day, randomized controlled trial to study effects of glucose in exposure sessions of participants with public speaking anxiety.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- A systematic review of spontaneous recovery in human fear conditioning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- The impact of extinction timing on pre-extinction arousal and subsequent return of fear.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Targeting Human Glucocorticoid Receptors in Fear Learning: A Multiscale Integrated Approach to Study Functional Connectivity.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Review
- Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A State-of-the-art Review.Current neuropharmacology · 2024Review
- Exogenous glucocorticoids to improve extinction learning for post-traumatic stress disorder patients with hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-axis dysregulation: a study protocol description.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2024Article
- The Neurotransmission Basis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders by the Fear Conditioning Paradigm.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Selective Disruption of Perineuronal Nets in Mice Lacking Crtl1 is Sufficient to Make Fear Memories Susceptible to Erasure.Molecular neurobiology · 2023Article
- Alleviating anxiety and taming trauma: Novel pharmacotherapeutics for anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- A single dose of hydrocortisone does not alter interhemispheric transfer of information or transcallosal integration.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Extinction of conditioned fear embodies a crucial mechanism incorporated in exposure therapy. Clinical studies demonstrated that application of the stress hormone cortisol before exposure sessions facilitates exposure success, but the underlying neural correlates remain unknown. Context- and stimulus-dependent cortisol effects on extinction learning will be characterized in this study and tested in the extinction and in a new context. Forty healthy men participated in a 3-day fear conditioning experiment with fear acquisition in context A (day 1), extinction training in context B (day 2), and recall in context B and a new context C one week later (day 3). Hydrocortisone (30 mg) or placebo was given before extinction training. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses and skin conductance responses (SCRs) served as dependent measures. At the beginning of extinction training, cortisol reduced conditioned SCRs, diminished activation of the amygdala-hippocampal complex, and enhanced functional connectivity of the anterior parahippocampal gyrus with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). After one week, the cortisol group showed increased hippocampal activation and connectivity to the vmPFC toward an extinguished stimulus and reduced insula activation toward a nonextinguished stimulus in the extinction context. However, this inhibitory cortisol effect did not extend to the new context. Taken together, cortisol reduced fear recall at the beginning of extinction and facilitated the consolidation of the extinction memory as evidenced by an inhibitory activation pattern one week later. The stress hormone exerted a critical impact on the amygdala-hippocampus-vmPFC network underlying fear and extinction memories. However, cortisol did not attenuate the context dependency of extinction.
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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.