BACKGROUND Psychological stress has long been recognized as a contributing factor to asthma symptom expression and disease progression. Yet, the neural mechanisms that underlie this relationship have been largely unexplored in research addressing the pathophysiology and management of asthma. Studies that have examined the mechanisms of this relationship in the periphery suggest that it is the s...

Background & Objective: It is reported that acute forced swimming stress induces analgesia immediately, and chronic stress induces hyperalgesia. Whereas in response to nociceptive stimulation, small-diameter C-fibers of the excitatory system in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord are activated, therefore, in the present study, the effects of C-fiber lesion in stress and dexamethasone-induced ana...

Acute heat stress perturbs cellular function on a variety of levels, leading to protein dysfunction and aggregation, oxidative stress and loss of metabolic homeostasis. If these challenges are not overcome quickly, the stressed organism can die. To better understand the earliest tissue-level responses to heat stress, we examined the proteomic response of gill from Geukensia demissa, an extremel...

Environmental stress is among the most important contributors to increased susceptibility to develop psychiatric disorders, including anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. While even acute stress alters gene expression, the molecular mechanisms underlying these changes remain largely unknown. 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) is a novel environmentally sensitive DNA modification that is high...

Acute negative emotional states may act as triggers of acute coronary syndrome (ACS), but the biological mechanisms involved are not known. Heightened platelet activation and hemodynamic shear stress provoked by acute stress may contribute. Here we investigated whether patients whose ACS had been preceded by acute anger, stress, or depression would show heightened hemodynamic and platelet activ...

Objective: Life stress is hypothesized to alter the dynamic regulation of the autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune systems. This study examined the effects of antecedent chronic life stress on psychological and physiological responsivity after acute challenge with a psychological stressor. Method: Using a within-subject mixed design, male volunteers with [N = 12) and without chronic life stres...

BACKGROUND Heart rate variability (HRV) measures homeostatic regulation of the autonomic nervous system in response to perturbation and has been previously shown to quantify risk for cardiac events. Despite known interactions among stress vulnerability, psychiatric illness, and cardiac health, however, this is the first study to our knowledge to compare directly the value of laboratory HRV in p...

Changes in plasma corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG) capacity can alter free plasma concentration and tissue availability of glucocorticoids (GC) and hence alter the organismal response to stress. However, CBG change in response to stress has not been extensively studied. While it is clear that chronic stress can causes CBG decline and in some species acute stressors can reduce CBG during th...

Our prior research has shown that environmental enrichment (i.e. rats reared in an environment with novel objects, social contact with conspecifics) produces a protective antidepressant-like phenotype in rats and decreases neurobiological effects of acute psychological stress. Although CREB activity has been identified as a major player, the downstream molecular mechanisms remain largely unexpl...