Grant: Operating Grant

Some people who experience intense fear and horror will develop an anxiety disorder called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The purpose of the proposed experiments is to provide a better understanding of how the brain controls negative emotions like anxiety that can develop after people experience a traumatizing event. Similar to people, animals exposed to stressful situations will develop anxiety-like behaviors that we can measure in the laboratory. We have used this rat model of PTSD to discover that a chemical messenger in the brain called orexin is involved in producing the anxiety associated with a stressful event. In this grant, we propose to further examine the brain mechanisms involved in this stress- and orexin-mediated anxiety. We also want to provide preclinical evidence that drugs that interfere with the orexin system can reduce anxiety levels in our rat model of PTSD. While this research is entirely animal base, it is realistic to believe that the results from these experiments could lead to the identification of novel drug target for developing drugs that act at some of the underlying neurobiological basis for PTSD. The development of similar drugs that act on the orexin system to treat insomnia is well underway by several pharmaceutical companies. We hope that our research may generate the interest in testing these drugs for treating anxiety and PTSD.