Behavioral and physiological assessment of an animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder triggered by exposure to a traumatic event. Despite recent progress, the causes and pathophysiology of PTSD remain poorly understood, partly because of ethical limitations inherent to human studies. One approach to circumvent this obstacle is to study PTSD in a valid animal model of the human syndrome. In one such model, extreme and long-lasting behavioral manifestations of anxiety develop in a subset of Lewis rats after exposure to an intense predator threat (PT) that mimics the type of life-or-death situation known to precipitate PTSD in humans. Thus, the first half of this thesis tested whether the Lewis rat model reproduces salient features of human PTSD. The results of these studies established the model’s face validity. The second half of this thesis used this model to identify alterations in the physiological properties of amygdala neurons that underlie the expression of PTSD. These studies revealed that PTSD is associated with differences in the synaptic responsiveness of central amygdala (CeA) neurons. Overall, these results suggest that the Lewis rat model of PTSD can be used to gain mechanistic insights in the pathophysiology of PTSD.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Sonal Goswam