A Novel Approach to Predicting Resilience to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Abstract
Fear is a powerfully adaptive cognitive process essential for an individuals survival. But too much or inappropriate fear learning and fear generalization can lead to psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and PTSD. Traditionally, a vast amount of research on the dopamine (DA) system focused on its role in reward and drug addiction. However, emerging studies suggest that dopamine circuits are also important for regulating fear behaviors. Our laboratory has uncovered that in response to fearful events, DA neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of freely behaving mice showed distinct tri-phasic firing patterns, namely suppression during the event-followed-by rebound-excitation upon the termination of the event before returning to the basal level (termed as suppression-and-off-set rebound-excitation, or rebound-excitation for short). This finding has led us to postulate a novel hypothesis that the DA neurons rebound-excitation represents a key safety-signal essential for tapering down anxiety and fear overgeneralization, and the production of this safety-signal requires the NMDA receptor in the DA neurons.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 02, 2020
- Accession Number
- AD1110684
Entities
People
- Joe Tsien
Organizations
- Medical College of Georgia