Nitrous Oxide for PTSD

• Status: Recruiting
• Trial end date: 2023-09-30
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: All

Summary

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) seriously disrupts the lives of many Veterans. Current first-line treatments, serotonin reuptake inhibitors or prolonged exposure therapy, take weeks to months to bring meaningful improvement, leaving Veterans experiencing prolonged suffering. A promising new treatment approach for rapidly reducing PTSD symptoms is nitrous oxide, an inhalation anesthetic and putative glutamate modulator that diminishes depression symptoms within 1 day and has limited side effects. If shown to be similarly effective in PTSD, nitrous oxide may add dramatically to the treatment armamentarium by bringing rapid symptom decrease before longer-term therapies take hold. The proposed projects test the efficacy of nitrous oxide in relieving Veteran's PTSD symptoms and, in parallel, explore how nitrous oxide may modify cognitive and pain outcomes.

• Phase: Phase 2
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: No

Details

• Lead Sponsor: VA Office of Research and Development
• Treatments: Midazolam; Nitrous Oxide

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• Veteran

• primary diagnosis of PTSD

• sufficient severity of PTSD symptoms

• capacity to provide informed consent

Exclusion Criteria:

• psychiatric or medical conditions that make participation unsafe

• pregnant or nursing females

• concurrent use of any medications that might increase the risk of participation (e.g. drug interactions