Fear enhanced learning after single prolonged stress prevented by previous adolescent stress exposure: Circuitry and neuronal subtype characterization

COTELLA, EVELIN MARIEL; LEMEN, PAIGE; MARTELLE, SUSAN E.; MOLONEY, RACHEL D.; FITZGERALD, MAUREEN; BEDEL, NICHOLAS; HERMAN, JAMES P.

San Diego

Congreso; Annual Meeting Society for Neuroscience; 2018

Fear enhanced learning after single prolonged stress prevented by previous adolescent stress exposure: Circuitry and neuronal subtype characterizationAuthor Block:  *E. M. COTELLA, P. LEMEN, S. MARTELLE, R. MOLONEY, M. FITZGERALD, N. BEDEL, J. HERMAN; Univ. of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH
Disclosure Block:  E.M. Cotella: None. P. Lemen:None. S. Martelle: None. R. Moloney: None. M. Fitzgerald:None. N. Bedel: None. J. Herman: None.
Support: 
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric condition that can develop after the individual is exposed to traumatic experience. Not everybody that experiences trauma develops the disorder suggesting there must be mechanisms that confer either vulnerability to develop the condition or on the contrary, more resilience to overcome the traumatic experience. Single-prolonged stress (SPS) is one of the most studied models of fear-potentiated fear that has shown to be a suitable protocol for the study of PTSD features. To study factors affecting vulnerability and resilience, we evaluated rats using a double-hit model of stress in adolescence and SPS in adulthood. Male and female rats were submitted either chronic variable stress (CVS) for 2-weeks starting at PND44. Stressors were presented randomly twice daily (cage vibration, cold water swim, warm water swim, cold room, hypoxia, or restraint) and every 2-3 days they had overnight stressors (single housing or overcrowding). At 85 days of age, a group of the rats was subjected to single-prolonged stress (2 hour restraint, 20 minutes of group swim, 10 min recovery, exposure to ether vapor until loss of consciousness) The resulting groups were: Control, Adol CVS, SPS and the double-hit group Adol CVS+SPS. After a week, animals? performance in an auditory-cued fear conditioning paradigm was tested. There were no differences in acquisition of freezing in response to the pairing of the shock to the auditory tone in any group or sex. During extinction, SPS males increased freezing behavior during all extinction sessions (p