Using a D3 Receptor Antagonist to Reduce PTSD-like Symptoms in a Female Rodent Model

Johns Hall 208

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) affects people who suffer from tragic events and have extreme difficulty recovering afterwards. We examined potential treatment and prevention solutions by furthering our understanding of the neural mechanism(s) that govern PTSD. Less than 3% of PTSD research is conducted using female rodents even though PTSD affects more females than males, so our lab decided to look at the implications of PTSD in female rodents. To induce PTSD in rodents we utilized the modified single prolonged stress (mSPS) model and explored the relationship between dopamine receptors and PTSD. Like humans with PTSD, rodents who underwent the procedure exhibit enhanced contextual freezing known as hypervigilence, increased anxiety-liked behavior, sustained exaggeration of the acoustic startle response, and stress-induced analgesia (Yamamoto et al., 2008). These behavioral responses closely resemble the clinical symptoms seen in human patients with PTSD. Using 34 adult C57BL/6J (C57) female mice, we induced PTSD with a modified single prolonged stress (mSPS) model with some mice treated with 12 mg/kg of SB 277011 A. We hypothesize that dopamine D3 antagonism will decrease the expression of PTSD-like behavior. We predict that administering an injection of SB 277011 A, a well-known D3 antagonist, will block expression of PTSD-like symptoms in female C57 mice. Results indicated that female mice showed an increase in PTSD-like behavior during the mSPS protocol and the group that received the D3 injection showed a significant decrease in hypervigilence. Together, these results suggest that our lab successfully reduced PTSD-like symptoms using the D3 antagonist SB 277011 A in female C57 mice.