Enhancing Psychological Interventions for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Treatment with Memory Influencing Drugs.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic psychiatric disease resulting from the experience or witnessing of traumatic events. Persistent PTSD symptoms impair patients' daily quality of life, jeopardizing sleep, mood, sociability, and arousal. Recommended psychological or pharmacological interventions are effective only in a small portion of patients and often lead to relapse.

Social Defeat Stress During Early Adolescence Confers Resilience Against a Single Episode of Prolonged Stress in Adult Rats.

Early-life adverse experiences (first hit) lead to coping strategies that may confer resilience or vulnerability to later experienced stressful events (second hit) and the subsequent development of stress-related psychopathologies. Here, we investigated whether exposure to two stressors at different stages in life has long-term effects on emotional and cognitive capabilities, and whether the interaction between the two stressors influences stress resilience. Male rats were subjected to social defeat stress (SDS, first hit) in adolescence and to a single episode of prolonged stress (SPS, second hit) in adulthood.

Sex-divergent long-term effects of single prolonged stress in adult rats.

Single prolonged stress (SPS) is an experimental model that recapitulates in rodents some of the core symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although women have a two-fold greater risk to develop PTSD, most preclinical studies have been carried out in males. Furthermore, the long-term effects of behavioral alterations induced by SPS have been rarely investigated.

Predicting susceptibility and resilience in an animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder whose pathogenesis relies on a maladaptive expression of the memory for a life-threatening experience, characterized by over-consolidation, generalization, and impaired extinction, which are responsible of dramatic changes in arousal, mood, anxiety, and social behavior. Even if subjects experiencing a traumatic event during lifetime all show an acute response to the trauma, only a subset of them (susceptible) ultimately develops PTSD, meanwhile the others (resilient) fully recover after the first acute response. However, the dynamic relationships between the interacting brain circuits that might potentially link trauma-related experiences to the emergence of susceptible and resilient PTSD phenotypes in individuals is not well understood.