TBI Summary

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can result from several different manifestations of trauma including direct physical insult to the brain, environmental stressors and psychological trauma. All three can result in pathological plasticity in the brain. These studies will focus on mechanism of neural plasticity resultant from these types of trauma. 

A powerful technique for assessing learning and memory associated plasticity is fear conditioning. Fear conditioning is a behavioral method by which an organism, often a rodent, learns to fear new stimuli. Different aspects of the conditioning procedure rely on different brain regions. One region that is activated during fear conditioning is the amygdala. It is generally understood that the activation of various proteins in the amygdala are necessary for the development of a fear memory. One protein called mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) has been shown to be important in the formation of a fear memory in both the amygdala and hippocampus. 

In this study, we aim to provide fundamental data about how stressful experiences and brain injury influence the organization of plasticity markers in the amygdala and hippocampus.

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