New Research May Lead to New PTSD Treatment

Researchers at Northeastern University have found an interesting correlation between the fear responses in male and female rats. When rats are afraid, they typially freeze in their tracks – or at least that was the consensus until recently when assistant professor of psychology Rebecca Shansky found that female rats often respond to fear by “darting.” “They start running around like crazy,” Shanksy said in a release issued by the university. 

She also found that darting rats were more successful at integrating a process that suppressed the fear response, exhibiting a “cognitive flexibility” that the freezers lacked. Researchers began to distinguish between darters and freezers (active and passive responders, respectively), and this was when they found that it was the predominantly female darters who were more adaptive to fear, and more resilient as the experiment continued, ultimately not darting or freezing later on in the experiment. 

Following the fear conditioning, researchers used a process called “extinction” to suppress the rats’ fear response. They played the conditioning tone repeatedly without the previously associated shock. Eventually, a “good” memory may come to replace a negative one. This is similar to exposure therapy, which has been known to help some, but not all, with PTSD which currently affects about 8 million adults in a given year. The darters were more successful at extinction than the freezers, “suggesting that the neurobiological processes of the males and females differed; the females, it appeared, had an edge. ‘Femlaes may have developed adaptive strategies to fearful events,'” Shanksy said in the university release. This reserach is a starting point to determine whether PTSD treatments for women – who develop PTSD twice as frequently as men – should be different from those for men, and if so, what should that treatment look like?