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Individual behavioral profiling as a translational approach to assess treatment efficacy in an animal model of post-traumatic stress disorder

Ishita Sarkar, M. Snippe-Strauss, Adi Tenenhaus Zamir, Amir Benhos, G. Richter-Levin

Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2022

12 citations

Abstract

A major challenge in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) continues to be the large variability in responsiveness to pharmacotherapy. Only 20–30% of patients experience total remission to a specific treatment, while others demonstrate either partial remission or no response. However, this heterogeneity in response to pharmacotherapy has not been adequately addressed in animal models, since these analyze the averaged group effects, ignoring the individual variability to treatment response, which seriously compromises the translation power of such models. Here we examined the possibility of employing an “individual behavioral profiling” approach, originally developed to differentiate between “affected” and “exposed-unaffected” individuals in an animal model of PTSD, to also enable dissociating “responders” or “non-responders” after SSRI (fluoxetine) treatment. Importantly, this approach does not rely on a group averaged response to a single behavioral parameter, but considers a cluster of behavioral parameters, to individually characterize an animal as either “responder” or “non-responder” to the treatment. The main variable to assess drug efficacy thus being the proportion of “responders” following treatment. Alteration in excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance has been proposed as being associated with stress-related psychopathology. Toward a functional proof of concept for our behaviorally-based characterization approach, we examined the expression patterns of α1 and…

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