Repetitive Concussive Traumatic Brain Injury Interacts with Post-Injury Foot Shock Stress to Worsen Social and Depression-Like Behavior in Mice

The debilitating effects of repetitive concussive traumatic brain injury (rcTBI) have been increasingly recognized in both military and civilian populations. rcTBI may result in significant neurological, cognitive, and affective sequelae, and is often followed by physical and/or psychological post-injury stressors that may exacerbate the effects of the injury and prolong the recovery period for injured patients. However, the consequences of post-injury stressors and their subsequent effects on social and emotional behavior in the context of rcTBI have been relatively little studied in animal models. Here, we use a mouse model of rcTBI with two closed-skull blunt impacts 24 hours apart and social and emotional behavior testing to examine the consequences of a stressor (foot shock fear conditioning) following brain injury (rcTBI). rcTBI alone did not affect cued or contextual fear conditioning or extinction compared to uninjured sham animals. In the sucrose preference test, rcTBI animals had decreased preference for sucrose, an anhedonia-like behavior, regardless of whether they experienced foot shock stress or were non-shocked controls. However, rcTBI and post-injury foot shock stress had synergistic effects in tests of social recognition and depression-like behavior. In the social recognition test, animals with both injury and shock were more impaired than either non-shocked injured mice or shocked but uninjured mice. In the tail suspension test, injured mice had increased depression-like behavior compared with uninjured mice, and shock stress worsened the depression-like behavior only in the injured mice with no effect in the uninjured mice. These results provide a model of subtle emotional behavioral deficits after combined concussive brain injury and stress, and may provide a platform for testing treatment and prevention strategies for social behavior deficits and mood disorders that are tailored to patients with traumatic brain injury.