Mental vaccines? Researchers now pushing vaccine for PTSD

Friday, December 20, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: post-traumatic stress disorder, vaccines, metabolic hormones

(NaturalNews) Fox News is pimping the latest investigational drug that conventional scientists allege might be able to help prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in individuals exposed to trauma. A recent report by the news giant explains that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in conjunction with Massachusetts General Hospital, are working on a vaccine that supposedly blocks a natural stomach hormone linked to prolonged stress.

The new vaccine, says Ki Goosens, an assistant professor of neuroscience at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, was found in tests to block key receptors that uptake ghrelin, a hormone in the stomach that the body produces in response to stress. When given special drugs to block the excess production of ghrelin, rats induced with stress appeared to be less likely than other rats not given the drugs to develop protracted PTSD symptoms.

"We have a rat model of PTSD and what we show is that rats who've had a prolonged exposure to stress are more likely to have very strong fear memories when they encounter some sort of trauma and that's the same kind of relationship between stress and trauma that we see in people," Goosens stated to reporters.

"Our work actually suggests that if you knew somebody was going to be potentially exposed to a trauma, then putting them on a drug that could actually block ghrelin might actually lower the incidence of things like post-traumatic stress disorder, or depression."

Blocking grehlin to maybe prevent PTSD will definitely disrupt healthy metabolism

But is another vaccine what we really need as a society, especially one that inhibits a key hormone in the body responsible for regulating hunger and appetite? Like every other drug, this new vaccine attempts to correct an underlying health condition by simply covering up its symptoms, in this case by artificially lowering levels of an important amino acid peptide that the body needs to convert food into energy.

"[G]hrelin ... [has] been recognized to have a major influence on energy balance," explains a 2007 study on both ghrelin and leptin, a similar stomach hormone, that was published in the journal Obesity Reviews. "Ghrelin ... is a fast-acting hormone, seemingly playing a role in meal initiation."

In other words, MIT researchers are in the process of wasting millions of dollars trying to prevent PTSD by creating other health problems. Blocking the production and uptake of ghrelin, according to data gathered as part of the Obesity Reviews study, will almost certainly have the side effect of inhibiting the body's ability to regulate energy balance and food intake, thus leading to obesity.

"In obese subjects the circulating level of ... the orexigenic hormone ghrelin is decreased," explains the abstract of the study.

Western medicine has an obsession with vaccines

While PTSD is a very serious health condition, the idea of developing a so-called vaccine to prevent it is preposterous. The last thing people need is yet another injection loaded with toxic aluminum, formaldehyde, mercury (thimerosal), and the many other harmful adjuvant components that will most assuredly create even more disease, not to mention intentionally block an important physiological component responsible for metabolizing nutrients.

"Ghrelin is a hormone and also a neuromodulator that stimulates appetite and also enhances aspects of cognitive function," wrote Bruce McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York, in an email to Discovery News. "A systemic vaccination might not even work and could ... make people anorectic and impair other aspects of physiology by blocking good actions of ghrelin."

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foxnews.com

http://news.discovery.com

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov