Our dynamic environment regularly exposes us to potentially life-threatening challenges or stressors. To answer these challenges and maintain homeostasis, the stress response, an innate coordinated engagement of central and peripheral neural systems is initiated. Although essential for survival, the inappropriate initiation of the stress response or its continuation after the stressor is termin...

Neuroticism's prospective association with common mental disorders (CMDs) has fueled the assumption that neuroticism is an independent etiologically informative risk factor. This vulnerability model postulates that neuroticism sets in motion processes that lead to CMDs. However, four other models seek to explain the association, including the spectrum model (manifestations of the same process),...

Five experiments studied the modulation of acute opiate withdrawal by restraint stress. Rats were subjected to a 2-hr restraint stress, and 1, 3, or 7 days later they received a single injection of morphine followed by injection of naloxone. Naloxone precipitated a withdrawal syndrome. This syndrome was enhanced when it occurred 1 day after stress but was reduced when it occurred 7 days after s...

Miige Ersoy-Kart, and Ozgna Guldii (2005), Vulnerability to stress, perceived social support, and coping styles among chronic hemodialysis. The aim of this study was to investigate how coping mechanisms differ between hemodialysis patients and healthy people. The sample consisted of 110 adults (55 hemodialysis patients and 55 age and sex-matched healthy subjects). The shorter coping style scale...

Substance abuse increases an individual's vulnerability to stress-related illnesses, which is presumably mediated by drug-induced neural adaptations that alter subsequent responses to stress. Here, we identify repressive histone methylation in nucleus accumbens (NAc), an important brain reward region, as a key mechanism linking cocaine exposure to increased stress vulnerability. Repeated cocain...

The onset of psychosis is thought to involve interactions between environmental stressors and the brain, with cortisol as a putative mediator. We examined the relationship between the cortisol stress response and brain structure in subjects at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis. Waking salivary cortisol was measured in 22 individuals at UHR for psychosis and 17 healthy controls. Grey matter vo...

Mothers of adolescents and adults with fragile X syndrome (FXS) are faced with high levels of parenting stress. The extent to which mothers are negatively impacted by this stress, however, may be influenced by their own genetic status. The present study uses a diathesis-stress model to examine the ways in which a genetic vulnerability in mothers with the premutation of the FMR1 gene interacts w...

Owing to population growth and water demand, coastal aquifers all over the world are over–pumped, resulting in serious problems such as saltwater intrusion. So, in these conditions, assessing the groundwater system’s vulnerability and finding areas with saltwater intrusion potential are vital for the better management of aquifers. In this study, AHP-GALDIT was applied to saltwater intrusion vul...

Atherosclerotic plaques may rupture without warning and cause acute cardiovascular syndromes such as heart attack and stroke. It is believed that mechanical forces play an important role in plaque progression and rupture. A three-dimensional (3D) MRI-based finite-element model with multicomponent plaque structure and fluid-structure interactions (FSI) is introduced to perform mechanical analysi...