R Magalhães, D A Barrière, A Novais, F Marques, P Marques, J Cerqueira, J C Sousa, A Cachia, F Boumezbeur, M Bottlaender, T M Jay, S Mériaux, N Sousa
Stress is a well-established trigger for a number of neuropsychiatric disorders, as it alters both structure and function of several brain regions and its networks. Herein, we conduct a longitudinal neuroimaging study to assess how a chronic unpredictable stress protocol impacts the structure of the rat brain and its functional connectome in both high and low responders to stress. Our results reveal the changes that stress triggers in the brain, with structural atrophy affecting key regions such as the prelimbic, cingulate, insular and retrosplenial, somatosensory, motor, auditory and perirhinal/entorhinal cortices, the hippocampus, the dorsomedial striatum, nucleus accumbens, the septum, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, the thalamus and several brain stem nuclei...
December 5, 2017: Molecular Psychiatry