Project: Mapping and interrogating top-down control of the memory engram of the posttraumatic stress disorder

Acronym topdownPTSD
Duration 30/04/2019 - 30/04/2020
Project Topic Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder of significant prevalence and morbidity, whose pathogenesis relies on paradoxical changes of emotional memory processing. In PTSD, life threatening experience leave a lasting trace of fear memory, which can last a lifetime. It is estimated that roughly 50% of the people world-wide will encounter a trauma-causing experience once in their lifetime. This generate a huge burden on the European Union citizens and calls for attention to tackle PTSD. There is no suitable treatment is currently available to treat the cognitive features of PTSD, and/or to prevent its development. The present project aims at investigating the neurobiological underpinnings (at a synaptic level) of acute and chronic response to a traumatic experience both in animal and human subjects, who will (susceptible) or will not (resileint) develop the chronic pathological phenotype. Understanding the neurobiological basis of PTSD can be of great help in the identification of innovative therapeutic strategies. This can be done through genetic, biomarker, imaging and psychological screening. By generating drugs that activate these molecular mediators of plasticity, it may be possible to enhance extinction of inappropriate fear associations.
Network NEURON Cofund
Call Call for Proposals for Research Projects on "Synaptic Dysfunction in Disorders of the Central Nervous System"

Project partner

Number Name Role Country
1 Achucarro Basque Center for Neuroscience Fundazioa Coordinator Spain
2 Fondazione Santa Lucia Partner Italy
3 Pablo de Olavide University Partner Spain
4 Charité University Medicine Berlin Partner Germany
5 University of Bergen Partner Norway
6 Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun Partner Poland