Short environmental enrichment rescues effects of chronic stress in infralimbic neurons of mPFC in adult male rats

• Main Author: Hang, Nicholas Bao Han
• Other Authors: Rupshi Mitra
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/67351
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the prevalence of chronic stress in today’s modern society and the fact that chronic stress damagingly implicates the mPFC's IL cortex that is known to be responsible for extinction learning, we have investigated if environmental manipulations such as short-term EE could ameliorate such a consequence on the IL neurons. We examined the effects of short-term EE on the dendritic architecture and found that short-term EE does not alter the total dendritic length and the number of branch points but modulates the dendritic spine density of the IL neurons. Due to this modulation, short-term EE also rescued the dendritic spines from the effects of chronic stress, providing encouraging results as this could become a novel therapeutic intervention in combating psychopathologies such as PTSD and MDD, which are the repercussions of extinction learning deficits. This study also provides a platform for further possibilities and analysis that could beneficial in the future.