PTSD and fear

It’s interesting comparing the Reznikov and Herry papers, as Reznikov is searching for an animal model of PTSD with a fear conditioning model, and using behavioral and blood tests to determine if there is an animal model. Herry, on the other hand, is searching for a nerve pathway for fear and extinction of fear responses, which ties in with what Reznikov was studying. It is also interesting that although Reznikov is newer than Herry, they did not use the findings of Herry as another way to look at the effects on the weak-extinction rats. Or there may be future studies that combine the two, looking into how the fear response neurons react in rats that exhibit PTSD like symptoms. These two studies were researching two parts of the fear response, because the Herry study specified the BA neurons that connect to the hypothalamus, which helps with endocrine function. The Reznikov study used the amount of corticosterone in the blood as a measurement for fear responses, which is a product of the endocrine system. I found the results in experiment 2 of the Reznikov study to be particularly interesting, because they found no correlation between a rat’s fear response before the conditioning and the resulting fear response akin to PTSD. This means that you can’t tell based on behavior alone who would be predisposed to suffer from PTSD following a traumatic event. It would be interesting to see if a study could go Herry’s route, and study the way the neurons change in a fear-conditioning setting, and seeing if there are neural precursors in a rat that develops the weak-extinction.