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Some people can cope with the most extreme stress (i.e., they are resilient) whereas others develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and other disorders. These researchers used chronic social defeat in mice (an established model of psychosocial stress that induces avoidance, anhedonia, and anxiety) to examine genetic factors of resilience; 30% of mice are resilient to chronic social defeat.
Because manifestations of defeat, including avoidance and withdrawal, have been hypothesized to develop from an inability to mobilize reward and motivational systems, the investigators studied ΔFosB, a transcription factor induced in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) by reward and stress. After chronic social defeat, NAc levels of ΔFosB incr…