Affiliation:
1. Neuroscience Department, University Center of Health Sciences, University of Guadalajara, Sierra Nevada 950, Guadalajara 44340, Jalisco, Mexico
Abstract
The hippocampus is a brain region crucially involved in regulating stress responses and highly sensitive to environmental changes, with elevated proliferative and adaptive activity of neurons and glial cells. Despite the prevalence of environmental noise as a stressor, its effects on hippocampal cytoarchitecture remain largely unknown. In this study, we aimed to investigate the impact of acoustic stress on hippocampal proliferation and glial cytoarchitecture in adult male rats, using environmental noise as a stress model. After 21 days of noise exposure, our results showed abnormal cellular proliferation in the hippocampus, with an inverse effect on the proliferation ratios of astrocytes and microglia. Both cell lineages also displayed atrophic morphologies with fewer processes and lower densities in the noise-stressed animals. Our findings suggest that, stress not only affects neurogenesis and neuronal death in the hippocampus, but also the proliferation ratio, cell density, and morphology of glial cells, potentially triggering an inflammatory-like response that compromises their homeostatic and repair functions.
Funder
“Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología”
Programa de Fortalecimiento de Institutos, Centros y Laboratorios de Investigación, CUCS
Subject
Inorganic Chemistry,Organic Chemistry,Physical and Theoretical Chemistry,Computer Science Applications,Spectroscopy,Molecular Biology,General Medicine,Catalysis