Better Preclinical Models of PTSD

I found the Reznikov et al. article extremely interesting in looking at preclinical models, rather than trials themselves. It hadn't really occurred to me that changing a preclinical aspect of for example a trial to see the effects of possible treatments could impact its results, so this article was a great eye-opener for me. I thought the article presented some really interesting and convincing findings, however, I found the article, along with Herry et al. challenging and had to do some extra research around PTSD. On doing extra research it became apparent to me just how intelligent the ideas presented in this article were; as only 20-30% of people exposed to a traumatised event experience PTSD, so it actually really just wouldn't make sense to do a general experiment across lots of rats before deciphering a weak-extinction group that presents a behavioural impairment that does not occur unless the animals are submitted to a stressful event, show anxiety-like behaviours that develop after fear conditioning that are long lasting, showing freezing etc. in recall sessions and lower baseline corticosterone levels etc. that represents many of the criteria for PTSD. If experiments were done to develop treatments for PTSD, then including rats that do not present the criteria could effect results that could be detrimental in the treatment for PTSD.

Although this article was a really influencing article of preclinical PTSD models, I thought it maybe would have been even more convincing if they had included either another experiment or at least propose a structure of a possible experiment to test how using this preclinical PTSD model could influence studies of treatment of PTSD, whether perhaps changing the results of past experiments by separating the rats into groups or creating a new study to give further insight into treatments aiming at this weak-extinction group, especially as this weak-extinction group practically replicated the same percentages of rats that showed PTSD criteria v. the amount of humans exposed to trauma who develop PTSD.

I liked how Reznikov et al. then backed up their behavioural findings with the physiological evidence that in experiment 1 plasma corticosterone was measured and at baseline plasma corticosterone was significantly lower in weak-extinction rats. Although there were a few mixed findings among the two groups, I liked how Reznikov et al. integrated the physiological results to show strong enough evidence that corticosterone thresholds may be established for predicting the likelihoof of an animal presenting with weak extinction in a fear-learning paradigm.

Having read Herry et al. first, which I did think was very interesting, I thought this article was more evoking in its broader range of behavioural aspects of PTSD, not primarily memory, which led me to prefer the Reznikov et al. article.