Neural mechanisms of stress vulnerability and resilience.

Two interesting papers in the Journal of Neuroscience  deal with what is happening to nerve cells in mouse brains as they either do or don't recover from stress. Lehmann et al. demonstrate that glucocorticoid-dependent declines in neurogenesis drive changes in mood after social defeat and that glucocorticoids secreted during enrichment promote hippocampal neurogenesis and restore normal behavior after defeat, suggesting that treatments promoting neurogenesis can enhance stress resilience. Gourley et al. looked at the elimination of dendritic spines in the hippocampus caused by chronic stress exposure, and show that resilience, or recovery from stress, correlates with spine proliferation.