Birkmcleod3600

The perinatal window is a critical developmental time when abnormal gestational stimuli may alter the development of the stress system that, in turn, influences behavioral and physiological responses in the newborns. Individual differences in stress reactivity are also determined by variations in maternal care, resulting from environmental manipulations. Despite glucocorticoids are the primary programming factor for the offspring's stress response, therapeutic corticosteroids are commonly used during late gestation to prevent preterm negative outcomes, exposing the offspring to potentially aberrant stress reactivity later in life. Thus, in this study, we investigated the consequences of one daily s.c. injection of corticosterone (25 mg/kg), from gestational day (GD) 14-16, and its interaction with offspring early handling, consisting in a brief 15-min maternal separation until weaning, on (i) maternal behavior; and (ii) behavioral reactivity, emotional state and depressive-like behavior in the adolescent offspring. Corticosterone plasma levels, under non-shock- and shock-induced conditions, were also assessed. Our results show that gestational exposure to corticosterone was associated with diminished maternal care, impaired behavioral reactivity, increased emotional state and depressive-like behavior in the offspring, associated with an aberrant corticosterone response. The early handling procedure, which resulted in increased maternal care, was able to counteract the detrimental effects induced by gestational corticosterone exposure both in the behavioral- and neurochemical parameters examined. These findings highlight the potentially detrimental consequences of targeting the stress system during pregnancy as a vulnerability factor for the occurrence of emotional and affective distress in the adolescent offspring. Maternal extra-care proves to be a protective strategy that confers resiliency and restores homeostasis. Copyright © 2020 Castelli, Lavanco, Brancato and Plescia.There is a current dispute over the origins, incidence, and development of Positivity Bias, i.e., preferential processing of positive relative to negative information. We addressed this question using a multi-method technique of behavioral, psychometric and event-related potential (ERP) measures in a lexical decision task (LDT). Twenty-four university students (11 female) participated (age range 18-26), but four were omitted owing to data issues. Participants were classified as Positivity Biased (PB) if their LDT responses to positive words were faster than negative words, and vice versa for those classified as Negativity Biased (NB), leading to a group of 11 PB participants and a group of 9 NB participants. Interestingly, the PB group was significantly faster overall than the NB group and had significantly shorter P2 component ERP latencies in the left occipital region. Furthermore, the PB group had significantly higher scores for expressive suppression (ES), together with higher scores for Crystallized Knowledge and for cognitive reappraisal (CR). These results suggest that around 55% of the students had Positivity Bias, and these were more efficient in processing information and had better emotion regulation abilities than those with a Negativity Bias. Copyright © 2020 Taroyan, Butnicu, Ypsilanti and Overton.Psychoactive substance use is a nearly universal human behavior, but a significant minority of people who use addictive substances will go on to develop an addictive disorder. Similarly, though ~90% of people experience traumatic events in their lifetime, only ~10% ever develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Substance use disorders (SUD) and PTSD are highly comorbid, occurring in the same individual far more often than would be predicted by chance given the respective prevalence of each disorder. Some possible reasons that have been proposed for the relationship between PTSD and SUD are self-medication of anxiety with drugs or alcohol, increased exposure to traumatic events due to activities involved in acquiring illegal substances, or addictive substances altering the brain's stress response systems to make users more vulnerable to PTSD. Yet another possibility is that some people have an intrinsic vulnerability that predisposes them to both PTSD and SUD. In this review, we integrate clinical and animal data to explore these possible etiological links between SUD and PTSD, with an emphasis on interactions between dopaminergic, adrenocorticotropic, GABAergic, and glutamatergic neurobehavioral mechanisms that underlie different emotional learning styles. Copyright © 2020 María-Ríos and Morrow.Physical activities can have intrinsic motivational or reinforcing properties. The choice to engage in voluntary physical activity is undertaken in relation to the selection of other alternatives, such as sedentary behaviors, drugs, or food intake. The mesolimbic dopamine (DA) system plays a critical role in behavioral activation or exertion of effort, and DA antagonism or depletion induces anergia in effort-based decision-making tasks. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the decision-making processes that establish preferences for sedentary vs. activity-based reinforcers. In the present work with male CD1 mice, we evaluated the effect of tetrabenazine (TBZ), a DA-depleting agent, on a three-choice T-maze task developed to assess preference between reinforcers with different behavioral activation requirements and sensory properties [i.e., a running wheel (RW) vs. sweet pellets or a neutral nonsocial odor]. We also studied the effects of TBZ on the forced swim test (FST), which meas Copyright © 2020 Carratalá-Ros, López-Cruz, SanMiguel, Ibáñez-Marín, Martínez-Verdú, Salamone and Correa.The inducible nitric oxide synthase/nitric oxide (iNOS/NO) signaling pathway and inflammatory cytokines play important roles in the pathogenesis of exercise-induced fatigue. Studies have found that Mongolian warm acupuncture (WA) could alleviate exercise-induced fatigue. However, the exact mechanisms underlying its effects remain unclear. In the present study, we investigated the effects of Mongolian WA on iNOS/NO signaling pathway and proinflammatory cytokines in a chronic exhaustive swimming-induced fatigue rat model. Animals were randomly divided into Control group, Ctrl + WA group, Model group, and Model + WA group. Cytidine 5′-triphosphate purchase The body weight, exhaustive swimming time test, and Morris water maze test were performed before and after the chronic exhaustive swimming. The serum levels of interleukin-1β (IL-1β), interleukin-6 (IL-6), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interferon-γ (IFN-γ), and iNOS were detected by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The mRNA expressions of IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α, IFN-γ, and iNOS in the hippocampus were measured by real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).