Stress and hippocampal volume in rodents, a longitudinal study

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The impact of stress on memory is at least partly due to its influences on the hippocampus, a brain region that is important for learning and memory. Although chronic stress could reduce hippocampal volume, the functional significance of hippocampal shrinkage remains unclear. The difficulty of understanding the functional significance of hippocampal shrinkage may be partly caused by the almost exclusive use of a cross-sectional approach to investigate hippocampal volume differences between stressed and non-stressed individuals. Cross-sectional studies however fail to reveal causality. Another problem is related to the failure to control for individual differences in stress susceptibility in most stress studies. Investigating psychopathologies in people that had experienced wide scale traumatic events revealed that not all people are similarly affected by these events, so that some individual were resilient to trauma.