ArticleBiological psychiatry2015
Sex-specific neuroanatomical correlates of fear expression in prefrontal-amygdala circuits.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 153 citations in OpenAlex.
- A novel finding on sex-dependent diverse behavioral responses to the anticipation of a threat in a rat model of fear conditioning with the involvement of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the prefrontal cortex.Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- Optogenetic stimulation of the infralimbic cortex prior to fear extinction learning rescues deficits in a preclinical model of comorbid PTSD and AUD.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Functional specialization of mPFC-BLA and mPFC-NAc pathways in affective state representation.eLife · 2026Article
- A Selective Cortico-Limbic Network Organizes Behavior During Reward Seeking Under Threat.Journal of neuroscience research · 2026Article
- Synaptic, cellular, and circuit mechanisms underlying sex differences in behaviors.Biology of sex differences · 2026Review
- Dynamic representations of valence in anterior cingulate cortex in mice.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Female rats adopt a safety-first strategy in a high-conflict platform mediated avoidance task.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sexually dimorphic effects of single prolonged stress on conditioned suppression behavior in Long Evans rats with no detection of altered mRNA expression of VGLUT1, GAD1, and Arc in the ventral hippocampus.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Integrating Aversive Memories in the Basolateral Amygdala.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Estrous Cycle Impacts Fear Extinction and Relapse in Female Adolescent Rats.Developmental psychobiology · 2025Article
- Gut microbiome depletion modulates cocaine-induced behavioral and transcriptional responses in female mice.Journal of neuroimmunology · 2025Article
- Cross-ancestry and sex-stratified genome-wide association analyses of amygdala and subnucleus volumes.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- Sex Differences in Neural Circuits Underlying Fear Processing.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Renewal of conditioned fear in male and female rats.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Sex differences in contextual fear expression are associated with altered medial prefrontal cortex activity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Small Differences and Big Changes: The Many Variables of MicroRNA Expression and Function in the Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Leveraging interindividual variability in threat conditioning of inbred mice to model trait anxiety.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Pharmacological diacylglycerol lipase inhibition impairs contextual fear extinction in mice.Psychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Practical solutions for including sex as a biological variable (SABV) in preclinical neuropsychopharmacological research.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2024Review
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe neural projections from the infralimbic region of the prefrontal cortex to the amygdala are important for the maintenance of conditioned fear extinction. Neurons in this pathway exhibit a unique pattern of structural plasticity that is sex-dependent, but the relationship between the morphologic characteristics of these neurons and successful extinction in male and female subjects is unknown.
methodsUsing classic cued fear conditioning and an extinction paradigm in large cohorts of male and female rats, we identified subpopulations of both sexes that exhibited high (HF) or low (LF) levels of freezing on an extinction retrieval test, representing failed or successful extinction maintenance, respectively. We combined retrograde tracing with fluorescent intracellular microinjections to perform three-dimensional reconstructions of infralimbic neurons that project to the basolateral amygdala in these groups.
resultsThe HF and LF male rats exhibited neuroanatomical distinctions that were not observed in HF or LF female rats. A retrospective analysis of behavior during fear conditioning and extinction revealed that despite no overall sex differences in freezing behavior, HF and LF phenotypes emerged in male rats during extinction and in female rats during fear conditioning, which does not involve infralimbic-basolateral amygdala neurons.
conclusionsOur results suggest that the neural processes underlying successful or failed extinction maintenance may be sex-specific. These findings are relevant not only to future basic research on sex differences in fear conditioning and extinction but also to exposure-based clinical therapies, which are similar in premise to fear extinction and which are primarily used to treat disorders that are more common in women than in men.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.