Inhibition of prefrontal glutamatergic neuron activity during the recovery period following chronic stress disrupts fear memory in male rats: potential role of the infralimbic cortex.

Chronic stress typically leads to deficits in fear extinction. However, when a delay occurs from the end of chronic stress and the start of fear conditioning (a "recovery"), rats show improved context-cue discrimination, compared to recently stressed rats or nonstressed rats. The infralimbic cortex (IL) is important for fear extinction and undergoes neuronal remodeling after chronic stress ends, which could drive improved context-cue discrimination.

Corticosterone disrupts spatial working memory during retention testing when highly taxed, which positively correlates with depressive-like behavior in middle-aged, ovariectomized female rats.

Major Depressive Disorder affects 8.4 % of the U.S.

Chronic stress leads to persistent and contrasting stellate neuron dendritic hypertrophy in the amygdala of male and female rats, an effect not found in the hippocampus.

In males, chronic stress enhances dendritic complexity in the amygdala, a region important in emotion regulation. An amygdalar subregion, the basolateral amygdala (BLA), is influenced by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex to coordinate emotional learning and memory. This study quantified changes in dendritic complexity of BLA stellate neurons ten days after an unpredictable chronic stressor ended in both male and female rats.

Chronic unpredictable intermittent restraint stress disrupts spatial memory in male, but not female rats.

Chronic stress leads to sex-dependent outcomes on spatial memory by producing deficits in males, but not in females. Recently it was reported that compared to daily restraint, intermittent restraint (IR) produced more robust stress and anxiety responses in male rats. Whether IR would be sufficiently robust to impair hippocampal-dependent spatial memory in both male and female rats was investigated.