A recent study: Physical stress damages the movement centers in the brain

Stress appears to have a negative effect on the movement centers in the brain, and according to a recent study at the University of Bonn / Germany, neurons in rodents lose some of their connections with other neurons after stress, and some animals even developed an accompanying motor deficit.

Researchers believe that these findings may be useful for early diagnosis and improved treatment of stress-related illnesses such as depression, as the semi-permanent effects of stress on the brain have been documented, based on research published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

According to research, people with chronic stress often display abnormalities in their motor skills, such as poor fine motor control.

However, how these symptoms occur has not yet been studied.

So Professor Valentin Stein of the Institute of Physiology II at the University of Bonn explains that this was looked at in the aforementioned study, according to Science Daily.

The researchers used mice as experimental animals, some of whom were exposed to a stressful situation for a few days.

Meanwhile, they used a special microscopic method to take pictures of the rodents' brains.

They focused on the parts of the cerebral cortex responsible for motor control and learning new movements.

The researchers noted that after stressful situations, the studied neurons lost some synapses - these are the points of connection to other neurons.

To explain this more clearly, it is known that during learning processes, new synapses are usually formed or existing synapses are strengthened, but instead, stressed rodents lost up to 15 percent of their connections.

Which is accompanied by a deficit in motor learning in animals.

For example, they had to try to grab a grain of food with one hand and move it to their mouths. In the wild, mice use both paws to do this, so they had to relearn this skill.

As a result, the unstressed test group had a 30 percent success rate after five days, while the stressed rodents could only eat every 10 attempts.

Prof. Stein explains that based on the study, "It is possible that kinetic tests are well suited to detecting stress-related disorders such as depression before other symptoms appear."

 “Stress-related mental illnesses such as depression are also associated with neuronal deterioration,” concluded Catherine Gellner, a physician in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University Hospital Bonn. It can cause severe damage to the brain.”

The researchers believe this research could help understand the decline in learning ability in children or adults alike as a result of chronic depression or high stress at some point in life.

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