Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 19, 2026

Chronic Intermittent Ethanol Vapor Exposure Paired with Two-Bottle Choice to Model Alcohol Use Disorder
Published on: June 23, 2023
Chronic alcohol remodels prefrontal neurons and disrupts NMDAR-mediated fear extinction encoding
Andrew Holmes1, Paul J Fitzgerald, Kathryn P MacPherson
1Laboratory of Behavioral and Genomic Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, US National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. andrew.holmes@nih.gov
Abstract:
Alcoholism is frequently co-morbid with post-traumatic stress disorder, but it is unclear how alcohol affects the neural circuits mediating recovery from trauma. We found that chronic intermittent ethanol (CIE) impaired fear extinction and remodeled the dendritic arbor of medial prefrontal cortical (mPFC) neurons in mice. CIE impaired extinction encoding by infralimbic mPFC neurons in vivo and functionally downregulated burst-mediating NMDA GluN1 receptors. These findings suggest that alcohol may increase risk for trauma-related anxiety disorders by disrupting mPFC-mediated extinction of fear.

