We recently introduced behavioral profiling as a translational approach to increase the validity of animal models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Behavioral profiling utilizes the response of a ‘normal population’ of control animals and compares the performance of animals with a history of traumatic stress in different behavioral tests that can capture PTSD-like symptoms. Thus, affected, PTSD-like individuals can be subdivided from resilient trauma-exposed animals.

While in our recent study we focused mainly on tests for activity and anxiety, we now expand the behavioral tests battery and include also fear memory and extinction tasks as well as a spatial object recognition test in our behavioral profiling approach. Utilizing underwater trauma as the traumatic event, we found that only a small subset of animals exposed to underwater trauma showed lasting increases in anxiety-like behavior and heightened emotional memory formation. Adding juvenile stress as a model for childhood adversity increased the prevalence of such affected animals and furthermore and induced additional cognitive deficits in a subgroup of such emotionally affected individuals. In addition, multiple affected individual rats displayed increased local circuit activity in the dorsal dentate gyrus, as measured in vivo with paired pulse protocols in anesthetized animals.

Together, our findings highlight behavioral profiling, refined by including multiple behavioral tests, as a valid tool to identify PTSD-like vs. resilient individual animals and further suggest that enhanced local inhibition in specific circuits of the dorsal dentate gyrus may be associated with the observed symptoms.

我们最近引入了行为分析作为一种转化方法，以提高创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 动物模型的有效性。行为分析利用对照动物“正常群体”的反应，并在可以捕捉 PTSD 样症状的不同行为测试中将动物的表现与创伤应激史进行比较。因此，受影响的、类似 PTSD 的个体可以从有弹性的创伤暴露动物中细分。

虽然在我们最近的研究中，我们主要关注活动和焦虑的测试，但我们现在扩展了行为测试组，还包括恐惧记忆和消退任务以及我们的行为分析方法中的空间物体识别测试。利用水下创伤作为创伤事件，我们发现只有一小部分暴露于水下创伤的动物表现出持续增加的焦虑样行为和增强的情绪记忆形成。将青少年压力作为童年逆境的模型增加了此类受影响动物的患病率，此外，还会在此类情绪受影响的个体亚组中诱发额外的认知缺陷。此外，多只受影响的个体大鼠在背侧齿状回中显示出增加的局部回路活动，

总之，我们的研究结果突出了行为分析，通过包括多个行为测试进行了改进，作为识别 PTSD 样与弹性个体动物的有效工具，并进一步表明在背齿状回特定回路中增强的局部抑制可能与观察到的相关症状。