Preclinical models of overwhelming sepsis implicate the neural system that encodes contextual fear memory.

Long-term sepsis survivors sustain cryptic brain injury that leads to cognitive impairment, emotional imbalance, and increased disability burden. Suitable animal models of sepsis, such as cecal ligation and puncture (CLP), have permitted the analysis of abnormal brain circuits that underlie post-septic behavioral phenotypes. For instance, we have previously shown that CLP-exposed mice exhibit impaired spatial memory together with depleted dendritic arbors and decreased spines in the apical dendrites of pyramidal neurons in the CA1 region of the hippocampus.