Herry et al. and Reznikov et al

Both articles serve solid approaches to understanding specific parts of PTSD.  Herry et al. introduces the concept of using a stimulus to examine fear and extinction, explaining that there could be a process to eventually forming consolidated extinction memory. With the amount of stimulus provided for the animals, would there still be some memory exposure to the animal by having the animals continue to learn new things or is there a way to completely erase the memory by using specific stimulus?  I thought it was clever to show the comparison of muscimol and bodipy to show that BA activation is necessary for behavioral transitions. Though this is an important part of memory, I wonder if this same comparison could be used for hippocampal purposes, since this area could also play a factor in PTSD.

Reznikov et al. does a better job focusing on the behavioral aspects of PTSD. There are definitely more characteristics of PTSD, not just getting rid of the memory, but also attempting to have figure out ways to cope with a person’s anxiety and reactions to their surroundings. I also liked the way Reznikov et al, included levels of extinction, (weak or strong) because if we do look at PTSD in a clinical way, humans with PTSD vary with their stress/depression and how they deal with the traumatic events that occurred. It was interesting to observe how freezing differed in both articles, based on the order that the fear condition/fear renewal/extinction took place.  It seemed that in Reznikov et al. that fear conditioning showed similar freezing percentages for both groups but showed a significant difference when extinction took place the next day. However, while observing Herry. Et al, having mice go through extinction first then fear renewal showed only small significance. This may show that order of exposing fear or extinction may be important. Overall, both articles showed valid approaches to figuring out specifics aspects of PTSD.