Sex and estrous phase influence functional connectivity during fear extinction

We hypothesized that sex and estrous phase during fear extinction would influence neural activation, activity of catecholaminergic regions and overall functional connectivity during fear extinction. During fear extinction, proestrus and estrus females froze less than males and metestrus and diestrus females, exhibited reduced cFos in the prelimbic cortex and cingulate gyrus relative to males, had greater activity of the dorsal and ventral medial amygdala compared to males, displayed elevated cFos in ventral tegmental dopamine neurons compared to both groups, and demonstrated high overall functional connectivity distinguished by unique engagement of the dorsolateral striatum as a hub. Together, these findings reveal insight into how sex and estrous phase alter the neural processing of fear extinction and substantiate the dorsolateral striatum as a key region mediating fear extinction in proestrus and estrus females.

This dataset contains behavioral freezing and locomotor data from cued fear conditioning and extinction tests, cFos data from the prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens, hippocampus, amygdala and dorsal striatum and cFos/tyrosine-hydroxylase co-expression in the ventral tegmental area and locus coeruleus following fear extinction in male and female adult Long Evans rats, as well as all R codes used to analyze the data.