Authors:

Major: Biology

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

Not specified

About Paper:

Female Gonadal Hormones During Trauma May Account for Their Higher Risk of Developing PTSD Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic, deleterious mental disorder that can develop following a traumatic event. PTSD affects 8-26% of women, and women are 2-3 times more likely than men to develop PTSD, even after accounting for the type of trauma. This suggests that an inherently female trait may modulate the risk of PTSD after trauma in women. Since gonadal hormones play a crucial role in many sex differences, we investigated whether the estrous cycle of female rats affects the development of PTSD-like symptomatology after trauma. For this study, we utilized the well-published and validated rat model of PTSD, Single Prolonged Stress (SPS), to expose adult female rats to trauma during different stages of their estrous cycle. Rats then underwent fear conditioning, fear extinction, and extinction recall to determine the severity of extinction recall deficits, a cardinal deficit in patients with PTSD. Findings indicate that despite similar behavior to control animals during fear conditioning and fear extinction, female rats exposed to SPS exhibit extinction recall deficits. Further analysis revealed that female rats that underwent SPS during the proestrus stage of their cycle exhibited more significant deficits in extinction recall compared to those that underwent SPS during other cycle stages. It was also determined that the estrous stage on the day of fear conditioning or fear extinction did not affect extinction recall behavior. To eliminate the possibility that a group difference was falsely identified, a separate cohort of animals was tested in the same paradigm, and the same findings were replicated. Collectively, our data indicates that undergoing SPS during proestrus, the cycle stage in which estrogen and progesterone are at their peak, increased the risk of developing PTSD-like symptoms. This suggests that female gonadal hormones on the day of trauma may account for the higher prevalence of PTSD in women. Furthermore, this indicates that treatment approaches may need to be sex dependent and that current practices should be reconsidered. Poster Session 3 1:00 PM-2:00 PM CT Room C Poster #9: Bryson Gottschall Major: Neuroscience

Source:

Texas A&M University / 2026

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Major: Biology