Challenges and Opportunities in Psychiatric Neuroscience.

Psychiatry faces a number of challenges as a field. These include the high individual and societal costs of mental illnesses, overlapping and heterogeneous diagnoses, a complete lack of biomarkers, and treatments that, although efficacious for some, leave many without adequate relief. On the other hand, scientific and technical advances present considerable opportunities, especially in genomics, computational and theoretical approaches, and neural circuit technologies.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, indomethacin improves spatial memory and NMDA receptor function in aged animals.

A redox-mediated decrease in N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor function contributes to psychiatric diseases and impaired cognition during aging. Inflammation provides a potential source of reactive oxygen species for inducing NMDA receptor hypofunction. The present study tested the hypothesis that the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug indomethacin, which improves spatial episodic memory in aging rats, would enhance NMDA receptor function through a shift in the redox state.

Indomethacin Increases Neurogenesis across Age Groups and Improves Delayed Probe Trial Difference Scores in Middle-Aged Rats.

We tested whether indomethacin or rosiglitazone treatment could rejuvenate spatial ability and hippocampal neurogenesis in aging rats. Young (4 mo; = 30), middle-aged (12 mo; = 31), and aged (18 mo; = 31) male Fischer 344 rats were trained and then tested in a rapid acquisition water maze task and then fed vehicle (500 μl strawberry milk), indomethacin (2.0 mg/ml), or rosiglitazone (8.

Therapeutic effects of stress-programmed lymphocytes transferred to chronically stressed mice.

Our group has recently provided novel insights into a poorly understood component of intercommunication between the brain and the immune system by showing that psychological stress can modify lymphocytes in a manner that may boost resilience to psychological stress. To demonstrate the influence of the adaptive immune system on mood states, we previously showed that cells from lymph nodes of socially defeated mice, but not from unstressed mice, conferred anxiolytic and antidepressant-like effects and elevated hippocampal cell proliferation when transferred into naïve lymphopenic Rag2(-/-) mice. In the present study, we asked whether similar transfer could be anxiolytic and antidepressant when done in animals that had been rendered anxious and depressed by chronic psychological stress.

Some hormone, cytokine and chemokine levels that change across lifespan vary by cognitive status in male Fischer 344 rats.

We trained and tested young (6-8months; n=13), middle-aged (12-14months; n=41), and aged (22-24months; n=24) male Fischer 344 rats in a rapid acquisition water maze task and then quantified 27 stress hormones, cytokines and chemokines in their serum, hippocampi and frontal cortices using bead assay kits and xMAP technology. Middle-aged and aged rats learned the location of the hidden platform over training trials more slowly than their young counterparts. After training, young rats outperformed middle-aged and aged rats on both immediate and 24h retention probe trials and about half of the middle-aged and aged (aging) rats exhibited impaired performances when tested on the retention probe trial 24h later.