Abstract
Not everyone exposed to trauma suffers flashbacks, bad dreams, numbing, fear, anxiety, sleeplessness, hyper-vigilance, hyperarousal, or an inability to cope, but those who do may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD is a major physical and mental health problem for military personnel and civilians exposed to trauma. There is still debate about the incidence and prevalence of PTSD especially among the military, but for those who are diagnosed, behavioral therapy and drug treatment strategies have proven to be less than effective. A number of these treatment strategies are based on rodent fear conditioning research and are capable of treating only some of the symptoms because the extinction of fear does not deal with the various forms of hyper-vigilance and hyperarousal experienced by people with PTSD. To help address this problem, we have developed a preclinical eyeblink classical conditioning model of PTSD in which conditioning and hyperarousal can both be extinguished. We review this model and discuss findings showing that unpaired stimulus presentations can be effective in reducing levels of conditioning and hyperarousal even when unconditioned stimulus intensity is reduced to the point where it is barely capable of eliciting a response. These procedures have direct implications for the treatment of PTSD and could be implemented in a virtual reality environment.
Highlights
People exposed to trauma who suffer flashbacks, bad dreams, numbing, fear, anxiety, sleeplessness, hyper-vigilance, hyperarousal, or an inability to cope comprise the 15–25% who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [1,2,3]
There is a crucial need to know how responding to stressful events changes as a function of trauma for patients who suffer from PTSD and combat-related PTSD – a condition that can be resistant to behavioral and drug therapy [2, 4, 5]
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION There is a crucial need to know how responding to stressful events changes as a function of trauma for those who suffer from PTSD
Summary
People exposed to trauma who suffer flashbacks, bad dreams, numbing, fear, anxiety, sleeplessness, hyper-vigilance, hyperarousal, or an inability to cope comprise the 15–25% who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [1,2,3]. Despite some progress in diagnosing and treating PTSD in civilians, treating veterans is less successful [5, 15, 16], and PTSD among veterans results in increased death [17, 18] including suicide [18, 19] It is clear every effort, including better animal modeling, needs to be made to improve our understanding and treatment of PTSD. CRM is detected by comparing responses to a range of unconditioned stimulus (US) intensities by themselves before and after classical conditioning. This phenomenon has been observed by others in rabbit eyeblink conditioning [44, 45] and in rat eyeblink conditioning [46]. High levels of CRM only occur in 15–25% of rabbits exposed to eyeblink classical conditioning www.frontiersin.org
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