Prefrontal plasticity and stress inoculation-induced resilience.
Coping with mild early life stress tends to make subsequent coping efforts more effective and therefore more likely to be used as a means of arousal regulation and resilience. Here we show that this developmental learning-like process of stress inoculation increases ventromedial prefrontal cortical volumes in peripubertal monkeys. Larger volumes do not reflect increased cortical thickness but instead represent surface area expansion of ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Expansion of ventromedial prefrontal cortex coincides with increased white matter myelination inferred from diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging. These findings suggest that the process of coping with early life stress increases prefrontal myelination and expands a region of cortex that broadly controls arousal regulation and resilience.
Katz
Maor
M
Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., USA.
Liu
Chunlei
C
Schaer
Marie
M
Parker
Karen J
KJ
Ottet
Marie-Christine
MC
Epps
Averi
A
Buckmaster
Christine L
CL
Bammer
Roland
R
Moseley
Michael E
ME
Schatzberg
Alan F
AF
Eliez
Stephan
S
Lyons
David M
DM
D000818:Animals; D001010:Anxiety, Separation / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D011897:Random Allocation; D012453:Saimiri; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology