Perinatal running training reversed postnatal anxiety and depressive-like behavior and cognitive impairment in mice following prenatal subchronic variable stress.

Background: Pregnancy is a very complex and highly stressful time in women. Despite the high prevalence of postpartum depression, more than 50 % of mothers are undiagnosed or untreated, showing an urgent need to explore an effective preventive strategy. Regular physical activity has been suggested to be associated with an increased quality of life in pregnant and postpartum women.

Brief Pup Separation in Lactation Confers Stress Resistance with Increased Prolactin and Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis in Postpartum C57BL/6J Dams.

Prolactin (PRL) assumes a pivotal role during the postpartum phase, particularly within the hippocampus-a region densely populated with receptors for stress hormones, where stress significantly inhibits adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN). The reduction in neurogenesis is implicated in the pathogenesis of anxiety and depression. Mothers are at an increased risk of developing depression when exposed to chronic stress.

Brief pup separation during lactation confers resilience in behavioural deficits induced by chronic restraint stress in postpartum C57BL/6J dams.

Background: The postpartum period is a complex time for females that affects health recovery. Stress during this period is one of the main risk factors for depression. Therefore, preventing stress-induced depression in the postpartum period is of great importance.

Intermittent hypoxia exacerbated depressive and anxiety-like behaviors in the bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis mice.

Depression and anxiety are prevalent in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Recent researchers reveal that intermittent hypoxia (IH) increases the severity of bleomycin (BLM)-induced lung injury. However, experimental studies dealing with anxiety- and depression-like behavior in animal models of BLM-induced pulmonary fibrosis in a combination of IH are lacking, hence, this study aimed to investigate that.

Brief Maternal Separation Promotes Resilience to Anxiety-like and Depressive-like Behaviors in Female C57BL/6J Offspring with Imiquimod-Induced Psoriasis.

Background: Psoriasis is a common chronic inflammatory skin disease that often causes depression. Early life experience affects brain development and relates to depression. Whether the effect of different MS protocols in early life on anxiety-like and depressive-like behaviors in female offspring with imiquimod (IMQ)-induced psoriasis is unknown.

Swimming Exercise Modulates Gut Microbiota in CUMS-Induced Depressed Mice.

Background: Gut microbiota is associated with anxiety and depression, while exercise has been proved to alleviate depressive symptoms. However, the interaction of exercise, depression, and gut microbiota remains unclear.

Methods: Male C57/BL6J mice were exposed to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) for 6 weeks and then were subjected to a 5-week swimming program.

Swimming exercise reverses chronic unpredictable mild stress-induced depression-like behaviors and alleviates neuroinflammation and collapsing response mediator protein-2-mediated neuroplasticity injury in adult male mice.

Objective: Impaired neuroplasticity and neuroinflammation are vital in the mechanisms of depression. Exercise alleviates depressive symptoms and ameliorates body functions. Swimming is one of the most common exercises; however, whether swimming alters depressive behaviors and the underlying mechanism has not been fully elucidated.

The Effects and Mechanisms of Exercise on the Treatment of Depression.

It is necessary to seek alternative therapies for depression, because side effects of medications lead to poor adherence and some patients do not achieve a clinical treatment effect. Recently the role of exercise as a low-cost and easy-to-use treatment for depression has gained attention with a number of studies showing that exercise is effective at reducing depressive symptoms and improving body functions such as cardiorespiratory system and cognitive function. Because of the heterogeneity of exercise therapy programs, there is no standardized and unified program.

Maternal deprivation induces cytoskeletal alterations and depressive-like behavior in adult male rats by regulating the AKT/GSK3β/CRMP2 signaling pathway.

Early-life adverse events exert persistent effects on brain functions and may increase the risk of psychopathology in adulthood. However, the underlying mechanism remains unclear. The purpose of our study was to study the long-lasting effects of maternal deprivation (MD) on depression-related behaviors and microtubule dynamics, and to illuminate the underlying molecular mechanism.

Swimming exercise reduces the vulnerability to stress and contributes to the AKT/GSK3β/CRMP2 pathway and microtubule dynamics mediated protective effects on neuroplasticity in male C57BL/6 mice.

While swimming exercise has been shown to positively affect the development of the nervous system, it still remains unclear whether it reduces the vulnerability to stress. In this study, male C57BL/6 mice were exposed to swimming training for 5 weeks, and then subjected to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) for 4 weeks. We found that swimming exercise prevented anxiety-like and depressive phenotypes induced by CUMS, including increased anxiety-like behavior in the open field test (OFT) and elevated plus-maze (EPM) test and increased despair behavior in the tail suspension test (TST).

Neurogenic hypothesis of positive psychology in stress-induced depression: Adult hippocampal neurogenesis, neuroinflammation, and stress resilience.

Stress is an important risk factor for depression. Emerging evidence supports the hypothesis that stress-mediated neuroinflammation destroys brain function and leads to anxiety-like and depression-like behaviors. Previous studies of stress-induced depression have mainly focused on pathological damage; however, the rise of positive psychology has attracted the interest of many researchers in environmental enrichment to promote stress resilience.

Neuroinflammation decreased hippocampal microtubule dynamics in the acute behavioral deficits induced by intracerebroventricular injection of lipopolysaccharide in male adult rats.

Neuroinflammation plays a vital role in the pathology of depression. Microtubule dynamics produces an immediate response to stress, but the effect of microtubule dynamics in the rats with acute behavioral deficits following a central immune challenge remains elusive. Adult male Sprague-Dawley rats were subjected to the intracerebroventricular (icv) injection of lipopolysaccharide (.

Brief postpartum separation from offspring promotes resilience to lipopolysaccharide challenge-induced anxiety and depressive-like behaviors and inhibits neuroinflammation in C57BL/6J dams.

Emerging evidence indicates an important role for neuroinflammation in depression. Brief maternal separation promotes resilience to depression in offspring, but relatively little is known about the effects of different durations of postpartum separation (PS) from offspring on anxiety and depressive-like behaviors in dams following immune challenge. Lactating C57BL/6J mice were subjected to no separation (NPS), brief PS (15 min/day, PS15) or prolonged PS (180 min/day, PS180) from postpartum day (PPD) 1 to PPD21 and then injected with lipopolysaccharide (LPS).

Resilience in the LPS-induced acute depressive-like behaviors: Increase of CRMP2 neuroprotection and microtubule dynamics in hippocampus.

Depressive-like behaviors occur at 24 h after lipopolysaccharide (LPS) injection, but whether the animals have resilience has not been reported. This study is to explore the existence of resilience in the LPS-induced acute depressive-like behaviors and its biological changes in the neuroprotection and microtubule dynamics. The behavioral tests of Sprague-Dawley male rats, including body weight (BW), sucrose preference test (SPT), forced swimming test (FST) and open field test (OFT), which are used to explore depressive and anxiety-like behaviors, were detected at 24 h after intraperitoneal injection of LPS.

Long-term maternal separation potentiates depressive-like behaviours and neuroinflammation in adult male C57/BL6J mice.

Early life experience is closely related to depression caused by stress in adulthood. Early life experience, including maternal separation (MS), has been shown to evoke stress sensitivity to depression upon re-exposure to stress in adults. However, MS has also been shown to lead to resilience to stress-induced depression, which is contradictory and rarely studied.

Fluoxetine exposure for more than 2 days decreases the neuronal plasticity mediated by CRMP2 in differentiated PC12 cells.

Background: Recent studies indicate that antidepressants treatment restores neuronal plasticity. In contrast, some researchers claim that serotonergic antidepressants, including fluoxetine (FLU), may exacerbate neuronal plasticity, which is contradictory and rarely studied. Since almost those studies exposed cells with drugs for 1-2 days as treatment models of antidepressants, it is possible that FLU exposure for longer periods would have opposite effects on neuronal plasticity.

PI3K/AKT/GSK3β/CRMP-2-mediated neuroplasticity in depression induced by stress.

Early neurodevelopmental dysplasia or disorder is an important stimulus for depression, but early stress can easily damage nerve development and lead to decreased neural plasticity. Because of the characteristics of nerve cell, nerve loop, structure instability and so on, stress can often lead to the occurrence and recurrence of depression. Stress is often associated with the release of inflammatory factors in the central nervous system.

Sex-dependent impact of different degrees of maternal separation experience on OFT behavioral performances after adult chronic unpredictable mild stress exposure in rats.

Early-life social-environmental factors are important for normal development, and different degrees of early-life stress experience have different impacts on adult behaviors and stress responsiveness. The aim of present study was to investigate the long-term effects of different degrees of maternal separation (MS) on male and female rats and subsequent responsiveness to chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) exposure in adults. Sprague-Dawley (SD) newborn pups were exposed to either 15 min/day of MS (MS15), 360 min/day of MS (MS360) or no separation (NS) during postnatal day (PND)4-PND10.