Neurophysiological analysis of the development of endocrine and hypertensive reactions in prolonged emotional stress

Electrocorticogram in rats loaded with SART stress (repeated cold stress).

“…Various types of stress have been reported to evoke changes in the ECoG of experimental animals (25)(26)(27)(28).…”

Blunted GABA-mediated inhibition within the dorsomedial hypothalamus potentiates the cardiovascular response to emotional stress in rats fed a high-fat diet

“…These are characterized by increases in the circulating adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), mean arterial pressure (MAP), HR and temperature (Stotz-Potter et al, 1996a;Stotz-Potter et al, 1996b;de Menezes et al, 2008;Ootsuka et al, 2008). However, chronic exposure to stressful situations, leading to sustained alteration in MAP and HR, can result in cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension, cardiac arrhythmia and infarction (Amiragova, 1985;Leor et al, 1996;DiMicco et al, 2002).…”

Physiological Consequences of Repeated Exposures to Conditioned Fear

“…For example, exposure to chronic or repeated psychological/emotional stressors is a risk factor for developing and increasing the severity of cardiovascular (CV) diseases [5,6,7,8] including coronary artery disease [9,10,11,12], and for producing CV adaptations that may be preclinical indices of pathology, including changes in heart rate variability [13], ventricular arrhythmias [14,15], and vascular dominated blood pressure [16,17,18,19]. In addition to CV disturbances, chronic or repeated exposures to psychological/emotional stressors can disturb immune function [20,21,22,23], produce endocrine abnormalities [24,25] and disrupt circadian and diurnal physiological rhythms [26,27,28,29]. In fact, recent evidence suggests that stress-associated changes in circadian physiology may be etiologically linked to several adverse health consequences of repeated or chronic stress including metabolic syndrome [30,31], CV disease [32,33] and mood disorders [34,35,36].…”