Trial reportPsychopharmacology2024
The impact of doxycycline on human contextual fear memory.
Trial report in Psychopharmacology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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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
2 citing papers in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.
- Attenuating human fear memory retention with minocycline: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.Translational psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Lipopolysaccharide-induced Neuroimmune Alteration and Memory Decline in Aging Mice: The Role of Augmented Cellular Senescence.Neurotoxicity research · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
rationalePrevious work identified an attenuating effect of the matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) inhibitor doxycycline on fear memory consolidation. This may present a new mechanistic approach for the prevention of trauma-related disorders. However, so far, this has only been unambiguously demonstrated in a cued delay fear conditioning paradigm, in which a simple geometric cue predicted a temporally overlapping aversive outcome. This form of learning is mainly amygdala dependent. Psychological trauma often involves the encoding of contextual cues, which putatively necessitates partly different neural circuits including the hippocampus. The role of MMP signalling in the underlying neural pathways in humans is unknown.
methodsHere, we investigated the effect of doxycycline on configural fear conditioning in a double-blind placebo-controlled randomised trial with 100 (50 females) healthy human participants.
resultsOur results show that participants successfully learned and retained, after 1 week, the context-shock association in both groups. We find no group difference in fear memory retention in either of our pre-registered outcome measures, startle eye-blink responses and pupil dilation. Contrary to expectations, we identified elevated fear-potentiated startle in the doxycycline group early in the recall test, compared to the placebo group.
conclusionOur results suggest that doxycycline does not substantially attenuate contextual fear memory. This might limit its potential for clinical application.
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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 Socratic graph.