Abstract
Patients with panic disorders show a deficit of GABAA receptors in the hippocampus, parahippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex. Synaptic clustering of GABAA receptors in mice heterozygous for the γ2 subunit was reduced, mainly in hippocampus and cerebral cortex. The γ2+/– mice showed enhanced behavioral inhibition toward natural aversive stimuli and heightened responsiveness in trace fear conditioning and ambiguous cue discrimination learning. Implicit and spatial memory as well as long-term potentiation in hippocampus were unchanged. Thus γ2+/– mice represent a model of anxiety characterized by harm avoidance behavior and an explicit memory bias for threat cues, resulting in heightened sensitivity to negative associations. This model implicates GABAA-receptor dysfunction in patients as a causal predisposition to anxiety disorders.
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Acknowledgements
We thank René Misslin for advice in the preliminary experiments and Guadalupe Reyes for technical assistance. This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant Nr: 31-39702.93 to B.L.)
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Crestani, F., Lorez, M., Baer, K. et al. Decreased GABAA-receptor clustering results in enhanced anxiety and a bias for threat cues. Nat Neurosci 2, 833–839 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/12207
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/12207
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