Adolescent Stress And Postpartum Depression Are Linked In A Study

(CTN News) – Adolescent stress can be associated with postpartum behavioral changes in women and other mammals, including depression after the birth of a child and changes in social behavior after childbirth.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have developed a mouse model to show how psychological stress during adolescence alters neuronal functions in the brain, which leads to changes in postpartum social behavior as a consequence.

It builds on their recent finding that mice exposed to social isolation in late adolescence, which alone does not cause endocrine or behavioral changes, show long-lasting behavioral changes only when these changes are accompanied by pregnancy and delivery during the course of the experiment.

With the help of this behavioral model, the team was able to probe for differences in postpartum neural circuits in mouse dams that were stressed in late adolescence and a control group of mice dams that remained not stressed throughout adolescence, due to normal social interactions with other mice.

In this study, the researchers focused on a region of the brain known as the prelimbic cortex that plays a critical role in social behavior and the regulation of stress responses in human beings.

As a result of the study, which was published in Nature Communications, the researchers found that adolescent psychosocial stress as well as pregnancy and delivery can adversely affect the glutamatergic pathways that connect the anterior insula of the brain cortex to the prelimbic cortex as a result of adolescent psychosocial stress.

In mammals, glutamate is a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in the excitatory function of the central nervous system.

Consequently, a reduction in the function of this corticocortical pathway altered neuronal activity in the prelimbic cortex, resulting in abnormal social behavior. As demonstrated by the test to determine how much time a mouse dam spends with a familiar mouse confined to one corner of a cage and a novel mouse confined to another corner of the cage, a mouse dam’s social behavior was abnormal.

According to Minae Niwa, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “these results suggest that prolonged elevations of the stress hormone during the postpartum period may play a crucial role in alterations in neural pathways and social behavior during this period.”

It has been discovered through our study that significant findings are associated with adolescent stress-induced postpartum changes related to the recognition of novelty in other mice, which is a key aspect of social behavior, which is linked to the anterior insula-prelimbic pathway.

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