Preclinical PTSD model

 PTSD is a debilitating trauma disorder affecting many human psyches. PTSD animal models do not accurately  account for individual stress responses, creating a need for Reznikov et al’s model. The fact that people have different psychological perspectives when examining a situation means that people deal with stress in a multitude of different ways. In relation to PTSD, something like this could mean that not all who experience trauma are affected by it (20-30% humans get it after trauma).  If an animal model effectively recreates PTSD symptoms – a whole new and useful method can be used to study and even identify rats venerable to such stress exposure, leading to better, more accurate potential treatments of PTSD, be it safety/coping paradigms, or drug testing in models. The simple fact that there are many types of stress inducers (predator exposure, drowning, physical, social, shocks) do not guarantee induced symptoms makes it worthwhile to characterize a god model of the disorder.  I was particularly impressed by the fact that the weal-extinction rats even had a lower baseline for plasma corticosterone , a physical symptom of ptsd (endrocrine dysregulation) in addition to the long-term (3 weeks!)  psychological ones (also showing a positive correlation with anxiety). It also made sense that ~25% animals showed the weak-extinction traits, similar to what percent of humans show PTSD after trauma. It would have been interesting if they posted data on the plasma corticosterone for the interthreshold rats as well, to see if their experiment was fully valid as some strong-extinction rats also had lower levels (could be a general result of stress as well). Furthermore, they have a strong base to continue their studies, as they state that the role of glucodcorticoids in PTSD is being investigated by others and they want to test 5-ht transportere, BDNF, neuropeptide Y and other factors using this model to see a difference between baser levels. Overall it provided a good source of information concerning PTSD research, and seems to establish a better model for its animal testing.

 The tests utilized: open-field test – to check if freezing was related to motor variablility (disproved by fig.3), novelty suppressed feeding – anxiety- and  elevator maze test ; were familiar to us now and show the standard range of testing for these types of experiments. They seem to be effectively showing the weak-extinction rat responses to be significantly different from the strong-extinction ones. One thing I did not understand was why the offline scoring of CS by blind observer was needed for the assays in the paper, as I am not sure of its meaning.