Ricerc@Sapienza

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) seriously affected the whole of
Italy. The extreme virulence and the speed of propagation resulted in restrictions and
home confinement. This change was immediately perceived by people who found
themselves exposed to feelings of uncertainty, fear, anger, stress, and a drastic change
in the diurnal but above all nocturnal lifestyle. For these reasons, we aimed to study
the quality of sleep and its connection to distress levels and to evaluate how lifestyle

Single prolonged stress (SPS) is an experimental model that recapitulates in rodents some of the core symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although women have a two-fold greater risk to develop PTSD, most preclinical studies have been carried out in males. Furthermore, the long-term effects of behavioral alterations induced by SPS have been rarely investigated. Here, we evaluated the long-term effects of SPS on PTSD-relevant behavioral domains in rats and whether these effects were sex-dependent.

Stressful life events are an important cause of psychopathology. Humans exposed to aversive or stressful experiences show considerable inter-individual heterogeneity in their responses. However, the majority does not develop stress-related psychiatric disorders. The dynamic processes encompassing positive and functional adaptation in the face of significant adversity have been broadly defined as resilience. Traditionally, the assessment of resilience has been confined to self-report measures, both within the general community and putative high-risk populations.

In this article, we investigated the presence of trauma-induced sequelae in a sample of 41 young individuals exposed to the L’Aquila earthquake who did not seek mental help in the aftermath of the disaster or in the ensuing months. We compared this group with 43 individuals, matched for age and education, who had not experienced an earthquake but had moved to and lived in L’Aquila after the earthquake and thus experienced the challenges of living in an earthquake-struck city.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder whose pathogenesis relies on a maladaptive expression of the memory for a life-threatening experience, characterized by over-consolidation, generalization and impaired extinction, which in turn are responsible of dramatic changes in arousal, mood, anxiety and social behavior. Even if human subjects experiencing a traumatic event during lifetime all show an acute response to the trauma, only a subset (susceptible) of them ultimately develops PTSD, meanwhile the others (resilient) fully recover after the first acute response.

Exposure to stress is an undeniable, but in most cases surmountable, part of life. However, in certain individuals, exposure to severe or cumulative stressors can lead to an array of pathological conditions including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized by debilitating trauma-related intrusive thoughts, avoidance behaviors, hyperarousal, as well as depressed mood and anxiety.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms of persistent anxiety arising after exposure to traumatic events. Stress susceptibility due to a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors plays a major role in the disease etiology, although biological underpinnings have not been clarified.