Baicalein (BA), a plant-derived active flavonoid present in the root of Scutellaria baicalensis, has been widely used for the treatment of stress-related neuropsychiatric disorders including depression. Previous studies have demonstrated that repeated restraint stress disrupts the activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, resulting in depression. The behavioral and neurochemica...

Enduring memories of sensory cues associated with drug intake drive addiction. It is well known that stressful experiences increase addiction vulnerability. However, it is not clear how repeated stress promotes learning of cue-drug associations, as repeated stress generally impairs learning and memory processes unrelated to stressful experiences. Here, we show that repeated social defeat stress...

Rats repeatedly exposed to restraint show a reduced hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis response upon restraint re-exposure. This hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis response habituation to restraint does not generalize to other novel stressors and is associated with a decrease in stress-induced c-fos expression in a number of stress-reactive brain regions. We examined whether habituation to re...

The organic cation transporter-3 (OCT3) is a glucocorticoid-sensitive uptake mechanism that has been shown to regulate the bioavailability of monoamines in brain regions that are implicated in the pathophysiology of depression. In the present study, the relative impacts of acute stress alone and acute stress with a history of repeated stress (chronic+acute) were evaluated in two strains of rats...

BACKGROUND Long commutes by car are stressful. Most research studying health effects of commuting have summarized cross-sectional data for large regions. This study investigated whether the levels of stress and individual characteristics among 30-60 min car commuters were similar across different places within the county of Scania, Sweden, and if there were changes over time. METHODS The stud...

In the design of a randomized clinical trial with one pre and multiple post randomized assessments of the outcome variable, one needs to account for the repeated measures in determining the appropriate sample size. Unfortunately, one seldom has a good estimate of the variance of the outcome measure, let alone the correlations among the measurements over time. We show how sample sizes can be cal...

Most studies on the stress-responsiveness of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis have focused on glucocorticoids, while few studies have investigated the adrenal secretion of dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEAS), which is unique to primates. Monkeys were chair-restrained for 2h per day for seven consecutive days, and blood samples were collected upon placement in the chair, and at 1...

Acute release of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) during repeated restraint (3-h restraint on each of 3 days) causes temporary hypophagia but chronic suppression of body weight in rats. Here we demonstrated that a second bout of repeated restraint caused additional weight loss, but continuing restraint daily for 10 days did not increase weight loss because the rats adapted to the stress. In...

Discriminative stimulus functions of drugs of abuse play an important role in the acquisition, maintenance and reinstatement of drug-taking behavior. The present study tested whether two different schedules of stressor presentation, i.e., repeated and variable, for 10 days, can modify the discriminative stimulus effects of cocaine in male rats trained to discriminate cocaine (10 mg/kg, i.p.) fr...