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Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats
Fear and anxiety can be described as emotional and physical responses to predictable and unpredictable threats. While the amygdala is necessary for context and cued fear conditioning, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is important for anxiety-like behavior and conditioned responses to d...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Society for Neuroscience
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8741146/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34911788 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0233-21.2021 |
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author | Urien, Louise Bauer, Elizabeth P. |
author_facet | Urien, Louise Bauer, Elizabeth P. |
author_sort | Urien, Louise |
collection | PubMed |
description | Fear and anxiety can be described as emotional and physical responses to predictable and unpredictable threats. While the amygdala is necessary for context and cued fear conditioning, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is important for anxiety-like behavior and conditioned responses to diffuse and/or unpredictable threats. However, we still lack knowledge about how the BNST and amygdala nuclei act in coordination. Moreover, the incidence of anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is substantially higher in women than in men, but most studies of fear conditioning are conducted in male rodents. Here, we asked whether the BNST and the lateral, basal, and central nuclei of the amygdala are active during the expression of fear conditioning in male and female rats using FOS immunohistochemistry. We first show that the BNST is indeed involved in context fear expression in males, but not in females. The lateral amygdala was active in both sexes during context fear expression. We next trained animals using tone cues paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US), or tone cues which were unpaired with the US, and thus nonpredictive. Females displayed greater fear expression to these unpaired tones than males. FOS was upregulated in both the BNST and the basal amygdala during fear expression to unpaired tones in both sexes. The differential processing of fear responses by males and females highlights the need to acknowledge sex differences in conditioned fear memory. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8741146 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Society for Neuroscience |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87411462022-01-10 Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats Urien, Louise Bauer, Elizabeth P. eNeuro Research Article: New Research Fear and anxiety can be described as emotional and physical responses to predictable and unpredictable threats. While the amygdala is necessary for context and cued fear conditioning, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is important for anxiety-like behavior and conditioned responses to diffuse and/or unpredictable threats. However, we still lack knowledge about how the BNST and amygdala nuclei act in coordination. Moreover, the incidence of anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is substantially higher in women than in men, but most studies of fear conditioning are conducted in male rodents. Here, we asked whether the BNST and the lateral, basal, and central nuclei of the amygdala are active during the expression of fear conditioning in male and female rats using FOS immunohistochemistry. We first show that the BNST is indeed involved in context fear expression in males, but not in females. The lateral amygdala was active in both sexes during context fear expression. We next trained animals using tone cues paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US), or tone cues which were unpaired with the US, and thus nonpredictive. Females displayed greater fear expression to these unpaired tones than males. FOS was upregulated in both the BNST and the basal amygdala during fear expression to unpaired tones in both sexes. The differential processing of fear responses by males and females highlights the need to acknowledge sex differences in conditioned fear memory. Society for Neuroscience 2022-01-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8741146/ /pubmed/34911788 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0233-21.2021 Text en Copyright © 2022 Urien and Bauer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed. |
spellingShingle | Research Article: New Research Urien, Louise Bauer, Elizabeth P. Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title | Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title_full | Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title_fullStr | Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title_full_unstemmed | Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title_short | Sex Differences in BNST and Amygdala Activation by Contextual, Cued, and Unpredictable Threats |
title_sort | sex differences in bnst and amygdala activation by contextual, cued, and unpredictable threats |
topic | Research Article: New Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8741146/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34911788 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0233-21.2021 |
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