Protocols to Induce, Prevent, and Treat Post-traumatic Stress Disorder-like Memory in Mice: Optogenetics and Behavioral Approaches.

One of the cardinal features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a paradoxical memory alteration including both for salient trauma-related cues and for the surrounding traumatic context. Interestingly, some clinical studies have suggested that contextual amnesia would causally contribute to the PTSD-related hypermnesia insofar as decontextualized, traumatic memory is prone to be reactivated in contexts that can be very different from the original traumatic context. However, most current animal models of PTSD-related memory focus exclusively on the emotional hypermnesia, , the persistence of a strong fear memory, and do not distinguish normal (adaptive) from pathological (PTSD-like) fear memory, leaving unexplored the hypothetical critical role of contextual amnesia in PTSD-related memory formation, and thus challenging the development of innovative treatments.