Coping with Childbirth: Brain Structural Associations of Personal Growth Initiative

Neural contributors to trauma resilience: a review of longitudinal neuroimaging studies

Resilience in the face of major life stressors is changeable over time and with experience. Accordingly, differing sets of neurobiological factors may contribute to an adaptive stress response before, during, and after the stressor. Longitudinal studies are therefore particularly effective in answering questions about the determinants of resilience. Here we provide an overview of the rapidly-growing body of longitudinal neuroimaging research on stress resilience. Despite lingering gaps and limitations, these studies are beginning to reveal individual differences in neural circuit structure and function that appear protective against the emergence of future psychopathology following a major life stressor. Here we outline a neural circuit model of resilience to trauma. Specifically, pre-trauma biomarkers of resilience show that an ability to modulate activity within threat and salience networks predicts fewer stress-related symptoms. In contrast, early post-trauma biomarkers of subsequent resilience or recovery show a more complex pattern, spanning a number of major circuits including attention and cognitive control networks as well as primary sensory cortices. This novel synthesis suggests stress resilience may be scaffolded by stable individual differences in the processing of threat cues, and further buttressed by post-trauma adaptations to the stressor that encompass multiple mechanisms and circuits. More attention and resources supporting this work will inform the targets and timing of mechanistic resilience-boosting interventions.

Functional human brain connectivity during labor and its alteration under epidural analgesia

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the neural networks of pain during labor and its relief. It was hypothesized that epidural analgesia would affect the neural activities and the underlying network connectivity. Analysis using dynamic causal modelling and functional connectivity was performed to investigate the spatial activity and network connection of labor pain with and without epidural analgesia. This Institutional Review Board approved study acquired Magnetic Resonance Imaging from 15 healthy women of spontaneous normal delivery (with/without epidural analgesia = 7/8, aged 29.6 ± 2.3 and 29.3 ± 4.8 years old respectively) using a 1.5 Tesla scanner. Numerical rating score of pain was evaluated by a research nurse in the beginning of the first stage of labor and approximately 30 min after imaging examination. Six regions of interested from the activated clusters and literature were selected for dynamic causal modelling, which included primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, middle frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, insula and lentiform. Functional connectivity was calculated from selected sensory and affective regions. All analyses were performed by using software of statistical parametric mapping version 8 and CONN functional connectivity toolbox. The result showed that the experience of labor pain can lead to activations within a distributed brain network. The pain relief from epidural analgesia can be accompanied with altered functional connectivity, which was most evident in the cingulo-frontal system. The present study, therefore, provides an overview of a pain-related neural network that occur during labor and upon epidural analgesia.