Dynamic Variation in Hippocampal Metabolism after Acute Stress Exposure: An In Vivo Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study at 9.4 T

An acute stress response is a complex process that activates the neuroendocrine and metabolic systems for homeostasis. A study on acute stress is important to understand how an organism adapts to stress for survival. However, most studies have focused on chronic stress, and there are few studies on acute stress. They have analyzed the metabolic alterations in the brain at a particular time after acute stress. This study explored the temporal variations of the brain metabolites in the hippocampus after acute restraint stress using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy. All mice in the acute stress group were physically restrained for two hours in a 50 mL conical tube. A 9.4 T animal MRI and MRS scanner was used with point-resolved spectroscopy technique for data acquisition, which was repeated four times without interscan interval. Metabolites were quantified from the data using LCModel with a simulated basis set. Based on the change in concentration of metabolites, the data were statistically analyzed using two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance between groups and a support vector machine for all time points and Student’s t-test with FDR correction for each time point. The present study found that the differences between groups are significantly (P