Publications by authors named "V Begni"
Article Synopsis
- * After three weeks of CMS, about 50% of the tested female animals showed signs of anhedonia (loss of pleasure), linked to increased immune markers and inflammatory cytokines in their brains.
- * Treatment with the antipsychotic drug lurasidone was effective in reversing the symptoms of anhedonia and correcting the associated molecular changes in these stressed female rats, suggesting its potential use for treating related mental disorders.
Emotional dysregulation following prenatal stress is associated with altered prefrontal cortex responsiveness to an acute challenge in adolescence.
Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry
October 2024
Exposure to prenatal stress (PNS) has the potential to elicit multiple neurobiological alterations and increase the susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. Moreover, gestational stress may sensitize the brain toward an altered response to subsequent challenges. Here, we investigated the effects of PNS in rats and assessed whether these animals exhibit an altered brain responsiveness to an acute stress (AS) during adolescence.
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- Stress can lead to mental health issues like depression, but not everyone reacts the same way; some people handle stress better than others.
- Scientists studied rats to understand why some rats became stressed and vulnerable, while others stayed resilient and healthy.
- They found that vulnerable rats had more inflammation in their bodies and problems with making proteins, while resilient rats had better communication in their brains, pointing to potential new ways to help prevent or treat stress-related problems.
Exposure to adversities during early life stages (early life adversities - ELA), ranging from pregnancy to adolescence, represents a major risk factor for the vulnerability to mental disorders. Hence, it is important to understand the molecular and functional underpinning of such relationship, in order to develop strategies aimed at reducing the psychopathologic burden associated with ELA, which may eventually lead to a significant improvement in clinical practice. In this review, we will initially recapitulate clinical and preclinical evidence supporting the link between ELA and psychopathology and we will primarily discuss the main biological mechanisms that have been described as potential mediators of the effects of ELA on the psychopathologic risk, including the role for genetic factors as well as sex differences.
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- Exposure to stress, especially prenatal stress (PNS), can lead to long-term behavioral and biological changes that may increase the risk of developing mental disorders, but responses to stress vary among individuals.
- In a study with rats, PNS-exposed adolescents showed signs of emotional issues like anxiety and lack of pleasure, with 70% categorized as vulnerable to stress and 30% as resilient.
- The research also indicated that resilient males have different brain activation patterns compared to vulnerable ones, suggesting that understanding these differences could help in creating new treatment approaches for stress-related disorders.