Exposure to psychological trauma can hasten PTSD and its deleterious effects.
David Morilak, PhD, a professor of pharmacology and director of the Center for Biomedical Neuroscience at UT Health San Antonio, studies rats in an effort to understand the characteristics of stressful events that can lead to PTSD in humans.
As part of his research, Morilak studies stressed out rats. In real ways, as part of their research, he and his team are modeling psychotherapy in rats. But there are limits.
“We do not buy them little, tiny couches, and… we don't talk about their childhood, but we do cognitive training,” said Morilak. “And we're getting them to use the same strategies that current psychiatric practice gets people to use in order to improve brain function in a way that will improve brain health, and, ultimately, behavior and cognition and emotional regulation.”
They can identify parts of the brain that are changing when the animals are engaged in behaviors that can be considered therapeutic.
Using neurotransmitters, they observe signals and look for changes in shapes and sizes of a number of connections of neurons.
“These are the things that translate into improved brain function,” he said.
Morilak says that mental health issues can be studied in the lab in the same way we study our health issues—because they are health issues.
“So we use rats to study brain function,” said Morilak, “but also the way the brain is impacted by various insults. And by insults, that means something like PTSD, stress or illness.”
In the case of this system, to treat it, brain function has to be studied and understood.
PTSD is an issue with brain function. As with any other system in the human body, PTSD is an equivalent to an issue with a system dysfunction.
“We are very mechanistic,” said Morilak. “We want to understand how the machine works, how it goes wrong, and to identify therapies that will either fix or, more likely, overcome whatever has gone wrong due to … what life throws at us.”
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