Your heart rate spikes and yet you experience a shortness of breath. Your mind is overwhelmed with fear-filled stimulus. Your chest resists expansion and your lungs burn as your muscles ache for oxygen. An unbearable sense of dread floods your entire being. You may be experiencing an anxiety attack, one of many anxiety disorders. These include panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Let’s take a step over the edge into the depths of anxiety.
Ground Level
Anxiety is a result of Intense psychological stress which may induce physical/behavioral alterations as a result of changes in hippocampal brain function brought about by complex molecular signaling pathways.
There are interconnections between stress, behavior, and memory where stress plays an important role in long-term memory formation. Because memory and its formation are critical for our interactions with our environment and crucial to our survival (such as remembering a terrifying experience with peanut allergies from your past), stressful events induce the formation of long-lasting memories. These memories then influence our behaviors within our environment such as avoiding the peanut-butter and jelly sandwich a stranger handed you.
The Depths
Through the usage of rodent models and well-established stress-inducing experiments, the molecular mechanisms governing the observed changes related to stress and memory have been explored.
To briefly summarize the detailed pathways and mechanisms leading to anxiety and the formation of associated long-term memories, these events are closely related to glucocorticoids, MAPK, NMDA, and GABA, neural signaling pathways, which are all related to stress, behavioral changes, and long-term memory.
Recap
Subjection of individuals to traumatic or hyper stressful situations specifically early on in their development makes them more likely to develop anxiety disorders especially PTSD and is a result of an inability to properly cope with intense stresses. The link between stress, behavioral response, and memory is revealed, as aforementioned, through the interactions of glucocorticoids, NMDA, MAPK, and Gabaergic driven neural pathways in the regulation of gene transcription within the limbic system. Any disruptions to these pathways can result in stress-related disorders including PTSD. To summarize, a cascade of molecular interactions between several proteins and their effectors results in an increased Histone mark (H3S10pK14ac) which then encourages the stress induced transcription of two genes fos and erg1 which produces proteins important in the process of memory formation.
Relief
Further exploration and a deeper understanding of these mechanisms could lead to therapeutic treatments for stress-related disorders and shed light on the complex mechanisms that govern the link between stress, behavior, and memory. the link between psychological stress, the changes in behavior, and the effects on memory is an important subject of investigation as it could yield potential therapeutics with intentions of relieving individuals of their symptoms or the disorder completely.
