Stress and hippocampal volume in rodents, a longitudinal study

压力对记忆的影响至少部分是由于它对海马体的影响，海马体是一个对学习和记忆很重要的大脑区域。虽然慢性应激可以减少海马体积，但海马萎缩的功能意义尚不清楚。理解海马萎缩的功能意义的困难可能部分是由于几乎完全使用横断面方法来研究应激和非应激个体之间的海马体积差异。然而，横断面研究未能揭示因果关系。另一个问题是，在大多数压力研究中，未能控制压力敏感性的个体差异。对经历过大规模创伤事件的人进行的精神病理学调查显示，并非所有人都受到这些事件的影响，因此有些人对创伤具有弹性。

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.