MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jun-Hyeong Cho, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Cell Biology & Neuroscience
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: In order to survive in a dynamic environment, animals develop adaptive fear responses to dangerous situations, which requires coordinated neural activity in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and amygdala. Dysregulation of this process leads to maladaptive generalized fear in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which affects 7 percent of the U.S. population.
In this study, we found that a population of hippocampal neurons project to both amygdala and medical prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We also found neural mechanisms how these double-projecting neurons efficiently convey contextual information to the amygdala and mPFC to encode and retrieve fear memory for a context associated with an aversive event.
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