Drugs for Hepatitis C may reduce symptoms of PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects a lot of people. This possibly chronic illness causes disruption in people's lives and might cause new health problems or make pre-existing ones worse, like despair, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts. Despite the significant frequency of PTSD, only two medications--sertraline and paroxetine--have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat it, and both have demonstrated relatively little efficacy in easing PTSD symptoms. The researchers surprisingly discovered that several novel direct-acting antiviral (DAA) drugs used to treat hepatitis C virus infection were related to a reduction in PTSD symptoms during an initial exploratory analysis among a national cohort of VA patients. The results were released in the Biological Psychiatry journal.