Researchers find simple, inexpensive treatment for veterans suffering from PTSD

A team of researchers has now provided an early glimpse of how veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may benefit from one simple and inexpensive treatment involving nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas.

The study was led by the University of Chicago Medicine and the Stanford University School of Medicine team from the VA Palo Alto Health Care System (principal investigators Carolyn Rodriguez, MD, PhD, and David Clark, MD, PhD).

For military veterans suffering from PTSD, symptoms such as anxiety, anger and depression can have a devastating impact on their health, daily routine, relationships, and overall quality of life.

"Effective treatments for PTSD are limited. While small in scale, this study shows the early promise of using nitrous oxide to quickly relieve symptoms of PTSD," said anesthesiologist Peter Nagele, MD, chair of the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at UChicago Medicine and co-author of the paper.

The findings, based on a study of three military veterans suffering from PTSD and published on June 30 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, could lead to improved treatments for a psychiatric disorder that has affected thousands of current and former members of the US military.

For this new study, three veterans with PTSD were asked to inhale a single one-hour dose of 50 per cent nitrous oxide and 50 per cent oxygen through a face mask. Within hours after breathing nitrous oxide, two of the patients reported a marked improvement in their PTSD symptoms.

This improvement lasted one week for one of the patients, while the other patient's symptoms gradually returned over the week. The third patient reported an improvement two hours after his treatment but went back to experiencing symptoms the next day.

"Like many other treatments, nitrous oxide appears to be effective for some patients but not for others. Often drugs work only on a subset of patients, while others do not respond. It is our role to determine who may benefit from this treatment and who won't," explained Nagele, who is himself a veteran of the Austrian Army and grateful to have identified an opportunity to help other veterans.

Nagele is a pioneer in the field of using nitrous oxide to treat depression. Most commonly known for its use by dentists, nitrous oxide is a low-cost, easy-to-use medication. Although some patients may experience side effects like nausea or vomiting while receiving nitrous oxide, the reactions are temporary.

Exactly how and why nitrous oxide relieves symptoms of depression in some people has yet to be fully understood. Most traditional antidepressants work through a brain chemical called serotonin. Nitrous oxide, like ketamine, an anaesthetic that recently received FDA-approval in a nasal spray form to treat major depression, works through a different mechsm, by blocking N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.

A 2015 landmark study by Nagele found that two-thirds of patients with treatment-resistant depression experienced an improvement in symptoms after receiving nitrous oxide.

( With inputs from ANI )