A pill that many patients use now to control blood pressure also may help smokers kick the habit once and for all by erasing memories of smoking, researchers say.
The pill, propranolol, is a standard beta blocker that has the known side effect of causing memory loss. In this case, the side effect is being thought of in terms of the old joke about computer software design, as in, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”
A trial is under way at Massachusetts General Hospital to determine how effectively the beta blocker pill, in combination with nicotine replacement therapy, could be as a “delete button” to erase memories and habits connected to smoking.
The trial is taking place because standard nicotine replacement therapy helps break the physical addiction to nicotine but doesn’t stop the craving or desire to smoke. Such craving is triggered, it is believed, by the release of the brain chemical dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter intimately involved in emotional response, in feelings of pleasure and pain, and also in short-term memory.
Dopamine fools the brain into believing nicotine is essential to it.
Cues that trigger smoker’s memories — and thus the desire to smoke —often are things like that first cup of coffee in the morning or a glass of wine in the evening. Researchers believe that, every time we recall memories of smoking, or any other memory for that matter, the memory is changed slightly, and when the brain “re-files” it, the memory is recommitted in slightly different form.
Beta blocker drugs disturb this process, interfering with the emotional aspects of the memory. In other words, smokers will remember that they always smoked with that first cup of coffee, but they will forget to an extent the pleasurable associations connected with smoking while drinking coffee.
The study at Massachusetts General involves 50 subjects who have smoked at least 10 cigarettes a day for the previous three months. They are being given replacement therapy in the form of nicotine patches, which will be followed up with six weeks of taking either the beta blocker propranolol or a placebo.
A leading researcher in the field, Dr. Paul Kenny of The Scripps Research Institute, said, “It is a very exciting concept. The theory is that it blocks or erases memories associated with smoking.”
One out of every five adults in the United States still smokes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
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