A new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience used rodents to find how stress chemicals alter the brain, and could change how post-traumatic stress disorder is treated.
PTSD is a mental health condition caused by a horrifying event that shows symptoms such as anxiety and flashbacks, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The study exposed caged rats to ferrets outside of their environments, never touching the ferret but smelling, seeing and hearing it. A month later, the rats were exposed to lower challenges but still exhibited startled responses, according to a university release. A month is roughly equivalent to two or three years in a human.
Researchers led by Vaishali Bakshi, an associate professor of psychiatry in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and Abha Rajbhandari, a student in the Neuroscience Training Program, found the fear response created permanent changes in the brain, or “rewired” it. The repeated exposure caused hypersensitivity to a protein in the basolateral amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates fear responses.
This “rewiring” is believed to have caused the startled responses a month later in the rats, similar to responses seen in PTSD patients. The discovery could lead to improvements in treatment other than PTSD, according to assistant professor of psychiatry Brian Baldo.
“We believe the mechanism we discovered for trauma-induced 're-wiring' of the amygdala could also be important for stress-induced drug abuse, which is a common problem in people with PTSD,” Baldo said in the release.
