Ketamine reverses the impaired fear memory extinction and accompanied depressive-like behaviors in adolescent mice.

Ketamine rapidly reduces depressive-like behaviors and facilitates the extinction of fear memories in adolescent mice, an effect linked to presynaptic mechanisms that restore long-term potentiation. The findings suggest a potential new treatment strategy for post-traumatic stress disorder, which affects about eight percent of the population and is characterized by impaired fear memory extinction.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic and disabling condition arising after exposure to a severe traumatic event, which affects approximately eight percent of the population. The underlying neurobiology of PTSD, however, has only been partially understood. The exploration of fear memory and its extinction has been the subject to increase our understanding of PTSD. Our previous studies have already found that adolescent mice exhibited impaired fear memory extinction with accompanied depressive-like behaviors. Considering the relationship between ketamine and its rapid antidepressant function, we hypothesis that ketamine can facilitate the fear memory extinction so as to exhibit an antidepressant effects. In this study, to evaluate our hypothesis, we intraperitoneal (i.p.) injection of ketamine in adolescent mice and found that ketamine exhibited a rapid antidepressant effect and facilitated the fear memory extinction. Moreover, ketamine can also reverse the accompanied depressive-like behaviors and restore long-term potentiation (LTP) induction in extinction process, which involved the presynaptic mechanism. Our results suggest that ketamine exhibited an antidepressant effect in FST and facilitated the fear memory extinction via presynaptic-mediated synaptic plasticity, which may provide new strategy for treatment of PTSD.