It is now recognized that stress is an important factor in the occurrence or recurrence of various psychiatric disorders ranging from major depression to bipolar disorder to anxiety. Stress-induced seems to work by acting on individuals with susceptible genotypes.
Background of Stress-Induced Models in Psychiatric Disorders
Chronic or repeated stress, especially psychosocial stress, is a recognized risk factor for many emotional and psychiatric disorders in modern society. Therefore, there is a lot of evidence that chronic stress can increase the risk of psychiatric disorders such as severe depression and anxiety disorder in vulnerable individuals. Although many drugs can be used to treat these stress-related disorders, many patients do not respond to them, and those who do report side effects. Therefore, a major focus of modern basic research is to reveal the underlying causes of these diseases and develop novel and effective treatment strategies. Animal models can be used to reveal the biological mechanisms of specific diseases and test the efficacy of novel drugs.
Fig.1 Single prolonged stress (SPS) procedure and SPS-induced behavioral changes. (Souza, 2017)
Operational Strategies of Stress-Induced Models
Although animal models cannot fully simulate human psychiatric disorders, assessing the impact of certain risk factors on the disease will help to understand its etiology and treatment options. Consistent with this understanding, and clinical evidence suggests that chronic stress is a risk factor for such diseases.
Charles Darwin's initial observations found that animals and humans share similar characteristics in emotional expression, which increases the possibility of using other mammalian (mainly rodent) models to study the mechanism of psychiatric disorders. The development of stress-induced animal models helps to determine the pharmacological mechanism and potential clinical effects of drugs. Essentially, these models induce stress by placing animals in psychological or physical challenges. These procedures can be used in acute or chronic studies to assess the effect of stress on anxiety according to the goals and parameters selected by the experimenter.
What Can We Do?
The number of animal models of stress currently available is significantly greater than the models that first entered research use 50 years ago. This means that choosing the most appropriate model for a particular experiment is not always an easy task. Creative Biolabs' scientists rely on their rich experience to give reasonable suggestions on model design based on the assumptions to be tested by clients, experimental design and knowledge of the limitations of the model. In this process, we will also pay special attention to procedures that can control false positive or false negative results and biases caused by local laboratory conditions. If you are interested in our services, please feel free to contact us. We will get back to you shortly with a solution made specifically for your request!
Reference
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Souza, R. R.; et al. Using the single prolonged stress model to examine the pathophysiology of PTSD. Frontiers in pharmacology. 2017, 8: 615. Distributed under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.
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