Authors:

Emilia Jacome Justiniano

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About Paper:

Fear and stress are deeply interwoven psychological processes regulated by distributed brain networks. Chronic stress, in particular, plays an important role in disrupting normal fear processing and extinction learning— the ability to suppress previously learned fear responses—which has had profound implications for stress-related psychiatric conditions such as PTSD. While much of this research has focused on brain circuits, relatively little is known about the role of the spinal cord in fear regulation. Emerging evidence suggests that spinal microglia and neurons respond dynamically to stress and pain signals, yet their contribution to fear learning and memory processes like fear extinction remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated whether chronic stress alters microglial and neuronal activation in the lumbar spinal cord during fear extinction recall in C57BL/6J male mice. We hypothesized that using the chronic restraint stress model would impair extinction recall, and that this behavioral change would be accompanied by elevated microglial and neuronal activity markers in the spinal cord. We found that stress-primed, fear-conditioned mice compared to fear- conditioned-only mice show desensitization to freezing and chronic stress activates both microglia and neurons in the lumbar spinal cord. Our findings demonstrate how chronic stress impairs fear extinction recall and contributes to the lumbar spinal cord's involvement with defensive (stress and fear) responses. This study offers a window to broaden current models that are 36 beyond brain circuits, highlighting the spinal cord as an active player in adaptive emotional responses.

Source:

Columbia / Neuroscience and / 2027

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Co-authors:

Emilia Jacome Justiniano