Endocrine Abstracts

It is a well-known observation that glucocorticoid hormones facilitate the storage of stressful, emotional events into memory. How glucocorticoids act in these cognitive processes has still not been completely clarified. Since almost a decade we have been collecting data indicating that memory formation of stressful events involves epigenetic mechanisms coordinating transcriptional processes in dentate gyrus granule neurons. We found that such events evoke the phosphorylation ...

The regular performance of exercise has beneficial effects on autonomic control, metabolism, immune and brain function. To increase our understanding of the beneficial effects of exercise on stress coping we investigated changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis and behaviour in mice and rats that had been voluntarily exercising since 4 weeks. If given a running wheel in their home cage, rodents such as mice and (Sprague Dawley) rats run spontaneously. Th...

Aims: To define the ultradian pattern of corticosterone secretion in the rat, how this may be altered in different physiological states and the relevance of these patterns to nuclear signalling in the hippocampus.Methods: Rats were cannulated and attached to our automated blood sampling system. Some rats had simultaneous intracranial microdialysis for free corticosterone in the hippocampus and other rats were adrenalectomised and corticosterone replaced ...