Enhancing Psychological Interventions for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD) Treatment with Memory Influencing Drugs



Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic psychiatric disease resulting from the
experience or witnessing of traumatic events. Persistent PTSD symptoms impair patients’ daily quality
of life, jeopardizing sleep, mood, sociability, and arousal. Recommended psychological or pharmaco-
logical interventions are effective only in a small portion of patients and often lead to relapse. Thus,
there is a critical need to address a lack of advancement in the treatment of PTSD. The combination of
psychological interventions, aimed at facilitating the extinction of the traumatic memory, and pharma-
cological medications, represents a promising tool for PTSD treatment. Timely use of psychotherapy
in conjunction with pharmacological treatments, rather than monotherapy, could thus determine a syn-
ergistic effect by potentiating the effects of psychological interventions. In such a scenario, drugs that
modulate cognitive processes involved in the development and/or persistence of post-traumatic symp-
tomatology could be of great help to improve the outcome of psychotherapies and patients' prognosis.

The purpose of the present article is to review the current data available from clinical trials on com-
bined pharmacological treatments with psychological interventions in PTSD therapy. An overview of

findings from animal studies that prompted clinical research is also discussed.
