Ricerc@Sapienza

Translational animal models for studying post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are valuable for elucidating the poorly understood neurobiology of this neuropsychiatric disorder. These models should encompass crucial features, including persistence of PTSD-like phenotypes triggered after exposure to a single traumatic event, trauma susceptibility/resilience and predictive validity. Here we propose a novel arousal-based individual screening (AIS) model that recapitulates all these features.

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 in turn are responsible of dramatic changes in arousal, mood, anxiety and social behavior. Even if human subjects experiencing a traumatic event during lifetime all show an acute response to the trauma, only a subset (susceptible) of them ultimately develops PTSD, meanwhile the others (resilient) fully recover after the first acute response.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms of persistent anxiety arising after exposure to traumatic events. Stress susceptibility due to a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors plays a major role in the disease etiology, although biological underpinnings have not been clarified.