ArticleMolecular psychiatry2018
The dynamics of stress: a longitudinal MRI study of rat brain structure and connectome.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- When Does Stress Build Strength? Linking Stress Physiology to Resilience in the Age of Rapid Environmental Change.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Nicotinamide riboside treatment enhances stress sensitivity and modulates hematological dynamics in aged mice.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Transient gray matter decline during antarctic isolation: Roles of sleep, exercise, and cognition.NPJ microgravity · 2025Article
- The Serial Effects of Callous-Unemotional Traits and Gray Matter Density in the Right Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex on Social Desirability.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- The effect of chronic stress and chronic alcohol intake on behaviour, brain volume, and functional connectivity in a longitudinal rat model.Brain communications · 2025Article
- Physiological and behavioral contagion/buffering effects of chronic unpredictable stress in a socially enriched environment: A preliminary study.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- A distinctive subcortical functional connectivity pattern linking negative affect and treatment outcome in major depressive disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Impact of Stress on Brain Morphology: Insights into Structural Biomarkers of Stress-related Disorders.Current neuropharmacology · 2024Review
- The cortisol switch between vulnerability and resilience.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Review
- Translational models of stress and resilience: An applied neuroscience methodology review.Neuroscience applied · 2024Review
- Coping with the multifaceted and multifunctional role of cortisol in the brain.Neuroscience applied · 2024Review
- Hippocampal Connectivity with the Default Mode Network is Linked to Hippocampal Volume in the Clinical High Risk for Psychosis Syndrome and Healthy Individuals.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Major gender differences in relations between life stressor frequency and gray matter in adolescence and emerging adulthood.Developmental psychology · 2023Article
- Altered whole-brain gray matter volume in form-deprivation myopia rats based on voxel-based morphometry: A pilot study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Home-cage behavior is impacted by stress exposure in rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Perceived stress modulates the activity between the amygdala and the cortex.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Article
- Chronic stress causes striatal disinhibition mediated by SOM-interneurons in male mice.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Brain structural correlates of upward social mobility in ethnic minority individuals.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2022Article
- The glucocorticoid footprint on the memory engram.Current opinion in endocrine and metabolic research · 2022Article
- Life Event Stress and Reduced Cortical Thickness in Youth at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis and Healthy Control Subjects.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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. These structural changes are associated with increasing functional connectivity within a network composed by these regions. Moreover, using a clustering based on endocrine and behavioural outcomes, animals were classified as high and low responders to stress. We reveal that susceptible animals (high responders) develop local atrophy of the ventral tegmental area and an increase in functional connectivity between this area and the thalamus, further spreading to other areas that link the cognitive system with the fight-or-flight system. Through a longitudinal approach we were able to establish two distinct patterns, with functional changes occurring during the exposure to stress, but with an inflection point after the first week of stress when more prominent changes were seen. Finally, our study revealed differences in functional connectivity in a brainstem-limbic network that distinguishes resistant and susceptible responders before any exposure to stress, providing the first potential imaging-based predictive biomarkers of an individual's resilience/vulnerability to stressful conditions.
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