University of Alberta scientist pinpoints anxiety trigger.
Discovery may lead to new drugs to block most common mental health problems.Those include phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic disorder. However, new drugs to treat anxiety disorders based on this research are still probably about 10 years away.
The research published last week in The Journal of Neuroscience pinpoints a previously undiscovered mechanism in the brain that controls anxiety. That mechanism affects neurons in the pea-sized part of the brain that assesses risk and reward, making those neurons more or less excitable and therefore more or less likely to send out anxious messages.
