Prazosin, an antipsychotic medication, can prove its “additional” worth by proving itself as an effective treatment option for complications as severe as prostate enlargement and high blood pressure caused by post-traumatic stress disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia.

This medication tends to block the increase of steroid hormones, which are known as glucocorticoids, as per researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University and Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

From News-Medical.Net:

To determine the effects of prazosin, OHSU and PVAMC researchers, led by Altaf Darvesh, Ph.D., formerly of the OHSU Department of Psychiatry, administered a glucocorticoid called dexamethasone to rats, then measured the expression of a protein known as heat shock protein 70, or HSP70, that serves as a marker for neurotoxicity. Pretreatment with prazosin, an alpha-1 receptor antagonist, resulted in “significant” slowing of dexamethasone-induced expression in the cerebral cortex.

“The one thing we don’t know for sure is, would you have to get it before you’re traumatized,” Berger said. “Lots of people have high levels of corticosteroids when they’re under stress, so could we give them prazosin ahead of time to protect them from brain damage?”

Berger said future research will continue to look at where and how steroids cause brain damage, and just when prazosin would have to be administered to most effectively protect the brain against damage.

S. Paul Berger, M.D., study’s co-author and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, OHSU School of Medicine and the PVAMC, remarked that corticosteroids cannot be termed as good in cognitive terms.

It was revealed that there may be a possibility that prazosin protects the brain from getting damaged by excessive levels of corticosteroid stress hormones.