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A tale of two transmitters: serotonin and histamine as in vivo biomarkers of chronic stress in mice

Authors :
Melinda Hersey
Melissa Reneaux
Shane N. Berger
Sergio Mena
Anna Marie Buchanan
Yangguang Ou
Navid Tavakoli
Lawrence P. Reagan
Claudia Clopath
Parastoo Hashemi
Source :
Journal of Neuroinflammation, Vol 19, Iss 1, Pp 1-20 (2022)
Publication Year :
2022
Publisher :
BMC, 2022.

Abstract

Abstract Background Stress-induced mental illnesses (mediated by neuroinflammation) pose one of the world’s most urgent public health challenges. A reliable in vivo chemical biomarker of stress would significantly improve the clinical communities’ diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to illnesses, such as depression. Methods Male and female C57BL/6J mice underwent a chronic stress paradigm. We paired innovative in vivo serotonin and histamine voltammetric measurement technologies, behavioral testing, and cutting-edge mathematical methods to correlate chemistry to stress and behavior. Results Inflammation-induced increases in hypothalamic histamine were co-measured with decreased in vivo extracellular hippocampal serotonin in mice that underwent a chronic stress paradigm, regardless of behavioral phenotype. In animals with depression phenotypes, correlations were found between serotonin and the extent of behavioral indices of depression. We created a high accuracy algorithm that could predict whether animals had been exposed to stress or not based solely on the serotonin measurement. We next developed a model of serotonin and histamine modulation, which predicted that stress-induced neuroinflammation increases histaminergic activity, serving to inhibit serotonin. Finally, we created a mathematical index of stress, S i and predicted that during chronic stress, where S i is high, simultaneously increasing serotonin and decreasing histamine is the most effective chemical strategy to restoring serotonin to pre-stress levels. When we pursued this idea pharmacologically, our experiments were nearly identical to the model’s predictions. Conclusions This work shines the light on two biomarkers of chronic stress, histamine and serotonin, and implies that both may be important in our future investigations of the pathology and treatment of inflammation-induced depression.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
17422094
Volume :
19
Issue :
1
Database :
Directory of Open Access Journals
Journal :
Journal of Neuroinflammation
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
edsdoj.002c395320fe4bddb4899365840ba765
Document Type :
article
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12974-022-02508-9