Susceptibility and Resilience to PTSD-Like Symptoms in Mice Are Associated with Opposite Dendritic Changes in the Prelimbic and Infralimbic Cortices Following TraumaShow others and affiliations
2019 (English)In: Neuroscience, ISSN 0306-4522, E-ISSN 1873-7544, Vol. 418, p. 166-176Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is triggered by exposure to traumatic events, but not everyone who experiences trauma develops this disorder. Like humans, PTSD-like symptoms develop in some laboratory rodents (susceptible individuals), while others express less or no symptoms (resilient individuals). Here, considering (i) the putative causal role of fear conditioning in PTSD development and (ii) the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the regulation of conditioned fear response, we tested whether trauma-associated changes in the mPFC may discriminate stress-resilient from stress-susceptible mice. From data on avoidance behavior (as a major symptom), we found that trauma-exposed mice displayed a bimodal distribution in their step-through latency, with low avoider (stress-resilient) individuals and high avoider (stress-susceptible) individuals. Dendrites of Golgi–Cox-stained neurons were analyzed in two parts of the mPFC: the prelimbic (PrL) and infralimbic (IL) areas. In the resilient phenotype, the total number of dendrites decreased in the PrL and increased in the IL; however, it decreased only in the IL in the susceptible phenotype compared to controls. These findings demonstrate that the type of post-trauma morphological changes in the mPFC is associated with susceptibility or resilience to trauma-related symptoms.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2019. Vol. 418, p. 166-176
Keywords [en]
PTSD-like state; susceptibility and resilience; prelimbic and infralimbic cortices; dendritic morphology
National Category
Medical and Health Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-200559DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2019.08.018OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-200559DiVA, id: diva2:1832675
Funder
European Commission2024-01-302024-01-302024-02-14