Dopamine Release in Response to a Psychological Stress in Humans and Its Relationship to Early Life Maternal Care: A Positron Emission Tomography Study Using [11C]Raclopride

By Jens C. Pruessner, F. Champagne, Michael Joseph Meaney, Alain Dagher. Journal of Neuroscience, 2004

736 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mesolimbic dopamine is thought to play a role in the processing of rewards. However, animal studies also demonstrate dopamine release in response to aversive stressful stimuli. Also, in animal studies, disruptions of the mother–infant relationship have been shown to have long-lasting effects on the mesolimbic dopamine system and the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis. We therefore investigated dopamine release in response to stress in human subjects, considering the relationship to early life parental care. We screened 120 healthy young college students for parental care in early life using a combination of telephone interviews and questionnaires. Five students from the top end and five students from the bottom end of the parental care distribution were then invited for a positron emission tomography study using [11C]raclopride and a psychosocial stress task. The psychosocial stressor caused a significant release of dopamine in the ventral striatum as indicated by a reduction in [11C]raclopride binding potential in the stress versus resting condition in subjects reporting low parental care. Moreover, the magnitude of the salivary cortisol response to stress was significantly correlated with the reduction in [11C]raclopride binding in the ventral striatum (r = 0.78), consistent with a facilitating effect of cortisol on dopamine neuron firing. These data suggest that aversive stressful events can be associated with mesolimbic dopamine release in humans, and that the method presented here may be useful to study the effects of early life events on neurobiological stress systems.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Psychiatry, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f11a4cd0c1b867020f63ae50242faf3d0633466d

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Citations in the corpus

The link between childhood trauma and depression: insights from HPA axis studies in humans. (2008, positive): “In addition, a PET study found that poor parental care in healthy subjects was associated with increased CNS dopaminergic responses to arithmetic stress, which were correlated with cortisol responses (Pruessner et al., 2004).”
Psychobiological Mechanisms Underlying the Social Buffering of the HPA Axis: A Review of Animal Models and Human Studies across Development (2013, background): “…and showed that participants reporting low parental care had higher dopamine release in the ventral striatum compared to high parental care subjects, and dopamine release was correlated with the magnitude of the salivary cortisol response to a laboratory stressor (Pruessner et al., 2004).”
The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia: version III--the final common pathway. (2009, positive): “Similar effects have also been found in humans, where striatal dopamine release in response to stress was increased in people who reported low maternal care during their early childhood.(107) Additionally, there are interactions with other neurotransmitter systems: dopamine release is not seen under”
Effort-related functions of nucleus accumbens dopamine and associated forebrain circuits (2007, background): “Although most imaging studies do not deal directly with DA per se, a recent study used PET measurements of in vivo raclopride displacement to assess DA release in humans and observed that exposure to psychosocial stress increased markers of extracellular DA in the ventral striatum in a manner that w”
Understanding how and why psychotherapy leads to change (2009, background): “For example, maternal caregiving behaviors (eg, nursing, licking, grooming) among rats influence the responsiveness to stress in the offspring; the effects can be seen in behavioral as well as neurological and endocrine responses (eg, Champagne, Francis, Mar, & Meaney, 2003 ; Pruessner, Champagne, ”
Estrogen Actions in the Brain and the Basis for Differential Action in Men and Women: A Case for Sex-Specific Medicines (2010, background): “This provides a possible mechanism and structural basis for functional change in the mesolimbic system that occurs after early-life exposure to stress (Meaney et al., 2002; Pruessner et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2009).”
The brain and the stress axis: The neural correlates of cortisol regulation in response to stress (2009, background): “(Pruessner et al., 2004), we investigated dopamine and cortisol responses to a social evaluative and mentally challenging stressor”
The Montreal Imaging Stress Task: using functional imaging to investigate the effects of perceiving and processing psychosocial stress in the human brain. (2005, neutral): “These results have been reported in detail elsewhere.(9)”
Dopamine System Dysregulation in Major Depressive Disorders (2017, background): “, 1992), as well as reduced striatal dopaminergic activity (Pruessner et al., 2004) also described in depressed patients compared with controls.”
Stress and Obesity. (2019, background): “Stress independently triggers dopamine release, as reliably shown in nonhuman animals (Dallman 2010) and in a few human studies (Pruessner et al. 2004, Wand et al. 2007), and this dopamine release has further downstream effects on food seeking and eating (Dallman 2010).”