Cholinergic blockade frees fear extinction from its contextual dependency.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Fears that are maladaptive or inappropriate can be reduced through extinction training. However, extinction is highly context-sensitive, resulting in the renewal of fear after shifts in context and limiting the clinical efficacy of extinction training. Lesion and inactivation studies have shown that the contextualization of extinction depends on the hippocampus. Parallel studies have found that intrahippocampal scopolamine (Scop) blocks contextual fear conditioning. Importantly, this effect was replicated with a noninvasive technique in which a low dose of Scop was administered systemically. We aimed to transfer the effects of this noninvasive approach to block the contextualization of fear extinction.

Methods

Rats were tone fear conditioned and extinguished under

SUBMITTER: Zelikowsky M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3525775 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature