Time to be confirmed
Venue: Centre Broca
Caroline Menard, PhD
Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval
CERVO Brain Research Center
Quebec, Canada
Website: menardneurolab.com
Invited by Nora Abrous (Magendie)
Title
Neurovascular adaptations underlie stress vulnerability vs resilience in mice and human depression
Summary
Our research program aims to shed light on the biological mechanisms underlying stress vulnerability vs resilience, with help of state-of-the-art photonic technology, in order to develop innovative treatments and identify biomarkers of mood disorders. Our multidisciplinary approach combines behavioral experiments to functional, cellular, molecular, and imaging studies and validation of our rodent findings in human samples. We showed that chronic stress exposure promotes blood-brain barrier hyperpermeability leading to passage of circulating inflammatory mediators into the brain and the establishment of depressive behaviors. These changes occur in a sex-specific manner which may contribute to sex differences in depression prevalence, symptoms and treatment responses.
Relevant publications
- Dudek et al. (2025) Astrocytic cannabinoid receptor 1 promotes resilience by dampening stress-induced blood-brain barrier alterations, https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2978353/v1
- Dion-Albert et al. (2023) Neurovascular adaptations modulating cognition, mood, and stress responses, Trends in Neurosciences, https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(23)00021-8
- Dion-Albert et al. (2022) Vascular and blood-brain barrier-related changes underlie stress responses and resilience in female mice and depression in human tissue, Nature Communications, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27604-x
- Dudek et al. (2020) Molecular adaptations of the blood-brain barrier promote stress resilience vs. depression, PNAS, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1914655117
- Menard et al. (2017) Social stress induces neurovascular pathology promoting depression, Nature Neuroscience, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-017-0010-3