title: Long-Term Effects of Acute Stress on the Prefrontal-Limbic System in the Healthy Adult.
abstract: Most people are exposed to at least one traumatic event during the course of their lives, but large numbers of people do not develop posttraumatic stress disorders. Although previous studies have shown that repeated and chronic stress change the brain's structure and function, few studies have focused on the long-term effects of acute stressful exposure in a nonclinical sample, especially the morphology and functional connectivity changes in brain regions implicated in emotional reactivity and emotion regulation. Forty-one months after the 5/12 Wenchuan earthquake, we investigated the effects of trauma exposure on the structure and functional connectivity of the brains of trauma-exposed healthy individuals compared with healthy controls matched for age, sex, and education. We then used machine-learning algorithms with the brain structural features to distinguish between the two groups at an individual level. In the trauma-exposed healthy individuals, our results showed greater gray matter density in prefrontal-limbic brain systems, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, than in the controls. Further analysis showed stronger amygdala-hippocampus functional connectivity in the trauma-exposed healthy compared to the controls. Our findings revealed that survival of traumatic experiences, without developing PTSD, was associated with greater gray matter density in the prefrontal-limbic systems related to emotional regulation.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Hou
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Dongtao
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Xue
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Du
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Qinglin
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: College of Electronic and Information Engineering, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Guangyuan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing, China.|School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
authors.forename: Jiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Qiu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D000679:Amygdala / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002681:China; D055866:Earthquakes; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008032:Limbic System / Q000503:physiopathology*; D000069550:Machine Learning; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult