Brain Plasticity And Chronic Stress

§ February 26th, 2009 § Filed under depression, plasticity § 1 Comment

As a reminder that plastic change can be harmful as well as helpful to our mental health, scientists have identified what looks to be a process of long term damage caused by chronic stress.

http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=892

“Stress and depression are known to cause a reversible retraction of dendrites in certain brain cells, particularly in the hippocampus, that McEwen and colleagues refer to as “adaptive plasticity.” The new research suggests that an increase in KA1, caused by the corticosteroid response in rats, may trigger this retraction. The finding follows recent work by Rockefeller’s Sidney Strickland, head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Genetics, that showed that KA1 production explodes in the hippocampus during simulated stroke in mice, driving a cell-death cascade that begins when part of the brain is deprived of blood. Combined, the work suggests that the relatively understudied KA1 subunit plays an important role in a key area of the brain in both causing damage in an uncontrolled trauma such as a stroke and in protecting the brain from damage under the more controlled circumstances of chronic stress.

“McEwen and colleagues have shown that healthy brains are remarkably resilient in the face of stress — brains replace their retracted neurons once the stress is removed. Perhaps, the researchers say, the same will prove true for depression. “One of the great hopes is that these changes in the hippocampus that happen with prolonged depression may not be signs of permanent irreversible damage but they may actually be signs of plasticity that we can treat with appropriate medications and also behavioral therapies,” McEwen says.”