Brain Environment Interactions: Stress, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and the Need for a Postmortem Brain Collection

Abstract

Stress, especially the extreme stress of traumatic events, can alter both neurobiology and behavior. Such extreme environmental situations provide a useful model for understanding environmental influences on human biology and behavior. This paper will review some of the evidence of brain alterations that occur with exposure to environmental stress. This will include recent studies using neuroimaging and will address the need for histological confirmation of imaging study results. We will review the current scientific approaches to understanding brain environment interactions, and then make the case for the collection and study of postmortem brain tissue for the advancement of our understanding of the effects of environment on the brain.

Creating a brain tissue collection specifically for the investigation of the effects of extreme environmental stressors fills a gap in the current research; it will provide another of the important pieces to the puzzle that constitutes the scientific investigation of negative effects of environmental exposures. Such a resource will facilitate new discoveries related to the psychiatric illnesses of acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder, and can enable scientists to correlate structural and functional imaging findings with tissue abnormalities, which is essential to validate the results of recent imaging studies.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. National Neurological Research Specimen Bank, VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System; Los Angeles, CA

2. Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, Harvard Medical School; Belmont, MA

3. Stanford University Brain Collection, Stanford University/VA Palo Alto Healthcare System; Stanford, CA

4. University of Washington Brain Collection, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Seattle, WA

6. Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry; New York, NY

5. NIMH Brain Collection, NIH/NIHM/Clinical Brain Disorders Branch; Bethesda, MD

7. University of Mississippi, Laboratory of Quantitative Neuroanatomy; Jackson, MS

8. Maryland Psychiatric Research Center; Baltimore, MD

9. University of Miami School of Medicine Brain Endowment Bank; Miami, FL

10. Stanley Brain Research Laboratory and Brain Collection; Bethesda, MD

11. New York Brain Bank, Columbia University; New York, NY

12. The Brain Tissue Donation Program, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Pittsburgh,PA

13. University of California Irvine Brain Repository; Irvine, CA

14. University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; Denver, CO