Acute behavioural stress facilitates long-term depression in temporoammonic-CAI pathway

Behavioural stress facilitates long-term depression in Schaffer collaterals-CAI pathway, but it is unknown whether it influences long-term depression in temporoammonic fibres-CAI. Here, we report that low-frequency stimulation induced long-term depression

Prenatal stress modifies hippocampal synaptic plasticity and spatial learning in young rat offspring

Clinical studies demonstrate that prenatal stress causes cognitive deficits and increases vulnerability to affective disorders in children and adolescents. The underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. Here, we reported that prenatal stress (10

Enriched environment treatment restores impaired hippocampal synaptic plasticity and cognitive deficits induced by prenatal chronic stress

Prenatal stress can cause long-term effects on cognitive functions in offspring. Hippocampal synaptic plasticity, believed to be the mechanism underlying certain types of learning and memory, and known to be sensitive to behavioral stress, can be changed

Stress within the postseizure time window inhibits seizure recurrence

Recurrence is a key characteristic in the development of epilepsy. It remains unclear whether seizure recurrence is sensitive to postseizure stress. Here, tonic-clonic seizures were induced with a convulsive dose of pentylenetetrazole (PTZ), and acute seizure recurrence was evoked with a subconvulsive dose of the drug. We found that stress inhibited seizure recurrence when applied 30 minutes or 2 hours, but not 4 hours, after the tonic-clonic seizure. The time-dependent anti-recurrence effect of stress was mimicked by the stress hormone corticosterone and blocked by co-administration of mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid receptor antagonists. Furthermore, in a PTZ-induced epileptic kindling model, corticosterone administered 30 minutes after each seizure decreased the extent of seizures both during the kindling establishment and in the following challenge test. These results provide novel insights into both the mechanisms of and therapeutic strategies for epilepsy. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Metastability mechanisms in thin film transistors quantitatively resolved using post-stress relaxation of threshold voltage

A new approach is presented to resolve bias-induced metastability mechanisms in hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin film transistors (TFTs). The post stress relaxation of threshold voltage (V(T)) was employed to quantitatively distinguish between the charge trapping process in gate dielectric and defect state creation in active layer of transistor. The kinetics of the charge de-trapping from the SiN traps is analytically modeled and a Gaussian distribution of gap states is extracted for the SiN. Indeed, the relaxation in V(T) is in good agreement with the theory underlying the kinetics of charge de-trapping from gate dielectric. For the TFTs used in this work, the charge trapping in the SiN gate dielectric is shown to be the dominant metastability mechanism even at bias stress levels as low as 10 V.