Posted On 05 Jan 2021

Stress and anxiety are an inevitable part of one’s life and there cannot be a utopian planet to escape from their wriggle. Stress-induced ailments made businesses in the United States incur a loss of an astronomical $300 billion a year through absenteeism, diminished productivity, employee turnover, and direct medical, legal, and insurance fees, as per a 2006 survey of the American Psychological Association (APA).

While many get bogged down by anxiety and stress, many others remain unfazed even in trying times. Their threshold to weather stress and anxiety is higher than their counterparts. According to scientists, the difference lies in certain brain areas that dictate the way one behaves during stress and anxiety.

A study, published in the Frontiers in Neural Circuits in March 2016, found that the stressed brain revealed certain patterns and identified a list of brain areas that might have a critical role to play in stress-induced depression.

Conducting the experiment and mapping the brain activity of mice placed under stress, they found a stark difference in brain activities of mice showing helpless behavior from those who displayed resilient behavior.

This could also be a solid premise for identifying new targets for the treatment of depression. The brain activities revealed in the study open up a huge pool of information for future investigations on depression treatment, anxiety disorder, and stress.

Brain and Stress Study

Helpless behavior was palpable in the brain of timid mice

The researchers found that the helpless mice showed an overall brain-wide reduction in the level of neuronal activation compared to mice showing resilient behavior. The researchers said, “In addition, the helpless mice showed a strong trend of having higher similarity in whole-brain activity profile among individuals, suggesting that helplessness is represented by a more stereotypic brain-wide activation pattern.”

For the timid mice, the helpless behavior was palpable and distinctly recognizable in the brain. The researchers said, “Helpless mice had more brain activity in common than the resilient mice, the researchers. We uncovered abnormally stereotypic brain activity in helpless animals.”

Timid mice showed significantly lower levels of overall brain activity

Some of the key findings of the study are:

• The timid mice exhibited lower brain activation in areas crucial for processing emotion and motivation, and for defensive behavior. In fact, those are the key areas for coping with stress and intrinsically associated with learning and memory.

• The timid mice also had significantly lower levels of overall brain activity, including the prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with organizing thoughts and actions, which gets implicated in mood or anxiety disorders.

The scientists believed that their findings would exhort novel insights into brain circuits underlying a model of depression. “It has the potential to guide future studies aimed at understanding the different roles specific brain regions play, as well as provide new targets for the development of new therapies,” they said.

Finding treatment options

The most important finding of the study was that there was a particular area in the brain that lit up more in the timid mice – the locus coeruleus, which has a significant role to play in stress-induced depression. The researchers felt that this could be an area for further study, significant for future treatments of depression.

The researchers call for further research to determine whether the neural changes are causally related to the expression of helplessness or resilience.

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