Topic: basolateral amygdala

Normative development in adolescence indicates that the prefrontal cortex is still under development thereby unable to exert efficient top-down inhibitory control on subcortical regions such as the basolateral amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. This imbalance in the developmental trajectory between cortical and subcortical regions is implicated in expression of the prototypical impulsive, compulsive, reward seeking and risk-taking adolescent behavior. Here we demonstrate that a chronic mild unpredictable stress procedure during adolescence in male Wistar rats arrests the normal behavioral mat

While many individuals experience traumatic events during their lifetimes, only some go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This susceptibility and resilience can be modelled in rodents using the stress-enhanced fear learning (SEFL) procedure, in which rats are exposed to a session of massed, unpredictable footshocks and subsequently assessed on tasks of adaptive fear learning. It has previously been observed that subpopulations of rats are susceptible or resilient to showing the PTSD-like phenotype following SEFL, and that these rats show differences in glutamate receptor sub

The inability to extinguish learned fear is a hallmark of trauma and stress-related disorders. The inhibitory learning fear extinction is an effective way to treat these disorders, however, the neurobiology of fear extinction has not been clarified. The Neuropeptide S (NPS) has been shown to promote arousal and anxiolytic-like effects and facilitate fear extinction. In rodents, NPS receptors (NPSR) are prominently expressed in brain structures involved in learning and memory. In humans, a correlation between the NPS system and female patients suffering from panic disorders has been shown. Alth