Citation

Patki G, Salvi A, Liu H, Salim S. Neurosci. Lett. 2015; 600: 28-32.

Affiliation

Department of Pharmacological and Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Houston, Houston TX-77204, USA. Electronic address: ssalim@uh.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.neulet.2015.05.060

PMID

26044989

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly recognized that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be acquired vicariously from witnessing traumatic events. Recently, we published an animal model called the "Trauma witness model" (TWM) which mimics PTSD-like symptoms in rats from witnessing daily traumatic events (social defeat of cage mate) [15]. Our TWM does not result in any physical injury. This is a major procedural advantage over the typical intruder paradigm in which it is difficult to delineate the inflammatory response of tissue injury and the response elicited from emotional distress. Using TWM paradigm, we examined behavioral and cognitive effects in rats [15] however, the long-term persistence of PTSD-like symptoms or a time-course of these events (anxiety and depression-like behaviors and cognitive deficits) and the contribution of olfactory and auditory stress vs visual reinforcement were not examined. This study demonstrates that some of the features of PTSD-like symptoms in rats are reversible after a significant time lapse of the witnessing of traumatic events. We also have established that witnessing is critical to the PTSD-like phenotype and cannot be acquired solely due to auditory or olfactory stresses.

Language: en