Stress Impairs Ability To
Remember and Learn

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Rats who endure extreme stress suffer memory loss and a lessened ability to learn new things, a team of researchers at the University of South Florida report. The findings suggest that humans may have trouble remembering new information or activities that were learned before or during a stressed out time.

``Our theory was that stress makes it difficult to remember something you had learned before you were stressed,'' psychology professor Dr. David Diamond, a behavioral neuroscientist at the Tampa Veterans Affairs Hospital, told Reuters Health.

Diamond presented preliminary results from studies conducted by researchers in his lab at last month's annual Experimental Biology 2001 conference in Orlando, Florida.

Diamond's lab conducted several studies looking at the effect of extreme stress on rats' brains. Stress can affect the electrical activity in the part of the brain that holds onto information--the hippocampus. ``When that happens, it's hard to remember things,'' Diamond says.

In one study, a group of rats were placed in a stressful situation--being forced to remain in a cage alongside a cat--while a group of control rats were not.

Those who endured the stress forgot how to run through a water-based maze they had previously mastered, while rats who didn't suffer any duress easily remembered how to run the maze. ''The stressed rats didn't remember at all,'' Diamond said. ''Their memory was completely wiped out.''

In addition, the researchers found that the stressed rats took even longer to relearn how to run the maze than they did the first time around, suggesting some capacity for learning had been altered.

A final study attempted to simulate the post-traumatic stress disorder humans face during wartime. The researchers placed a group of rats in a cage alongside a cat for 5 weeks, frequently changing the rats' living conditions.

The stressed rats behaved as if they had sustained damage to their hippocampus, continuously exploring their surroundings as if they had no ability to retain memory, Diamond noted.

Reference Source 89

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