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omg, it's true. stress really is wrecking our brains

in an experiment with mice, researchers found that stress affected the ability to learn new things.

by chris arnold

published mar 10, 2022

2 minute read

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2 minute read

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omg, it's true. stress really is wrecking our brains

researchers found how chronic stress can lead to brain abnormalities. getty

stress could have an impact on movements due to a reaction in the brain, researchers from the university of bonn in germany say. research published in the journal translational psychiatry shows that after being exposed to stressful situations, lab mice were found to have lost some neuron contacts in their brains and had developed motor deficits.

chronically stressed people can develop abnormalities in their fine motor skills, the researchers say, but how these symptoms first develop has not yet been studied in depth.

using a special microscopy method — essentially a special way to view the mice’s brains — scientists could see that there were fewer connections than normal in those under stress.

“with our method, it is possible to observe one and the same neuron at different points in time,” anne-katherin gellner, lead author on the study, said in a statement. “we can therefore see whether, and how, it changes as a result of stress.”

could we diagnose stress-related diseases sooner?

researchers say the discovery could be useful for earlier diagnosis of stress-related diseases, such as depression, as well as developing new treatment options. the results also document that stress can, in fact, leave both temporary and permanent traces of damage in the brain. when the synapses — nerve cells connecting with other nerve cells that usually happens during learning — were compared before and after stress, the ‘before’ images almost resemble a tree with many synapses branching out, while the ‘after’ photos look more like a twig.

and when the stressed mice were put up against a control group of non-stressed mice to see the difference in learning new skills, the results were telling. researchers trained the control group to eat a pellet of food using only one paw — as opposed to the mice’s natural way of using two paws — in five days with a 30 per cent success rate. the stressed group only managed a 10 per cent success rate.

“it is therefore possible that motor tests are very suitable for detecting stress-related disorders such as depression before other symptoms become apparent,” valentin stein, an author on the study, says.

the team of scientists also looked at the brain and spinal cord fluid, finding proteins that are normally found alongside diseases such as parkinson’s and alzheimer’s.

“we therefore believe that stress-related psychiatric diseases such as depression are also associated with the degradation of neurons,” gellner says. “accordingly, long-term stress — to which children are increasingly exposed — can potentially cause serious damage to the brain.”

as for what could be causing the loss of synapses, researchers believe certain immune cells such as the microglia, which accounts for about 15 per cent of all cells in the brain, according to a 1992 study from researchers at oxford, could be switched on during stress and actually attack the brain.

chris arnold is a toronto-based writer.

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omg, it's true. stress really is wrecking our brains

in an experiment with mice, researchers found that stress affected the ability to learn new things.

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omg, it's true. stress really is wrecking our brains

in an experiment with mice, researchers found that stress affected the ability to learn new things.

could we diagnose stress-related diseases sooner?

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