Arsenault Eric, Lavigne Andrée-Anne, Mansouri Samaneh, Gagné Anne-Marie, Francis Kimberley, Bittar Thibault P, Quessy Francis, Abdallah Khaled, Barbeau Annie, Hébert Marc, Labonté Benoit
CERVO Brain Research Centre, Centre Intégré Universitaire de Santé et des Services Sociaux de la Capitale Nationale, Quebec City, QC, Canada.
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Faculty of Medicine, Université Laval, Quebec City, QC, Canada.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2021 Aug 12;15:714810. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.714810. eCollection 2021.
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common consequences of chronic stress. Still, there is currently no reliable biomarker to detect individuals at risk to develop the disease. Recently, the retina emerged as an effective way to investigate psychiatric disorders using the electroretinogram (ERG). In this study, cone and rod ERGs were performed in male and female C57BL/6 mice before and after chronic social defeat stress (CSDS). Mice were then divided as susceptible or resilient to stress. Our results suggest that CSDS reduces the amplitude of both oscillatory potentials and a-waves in the rods of resilient but not susceptible males. Similar effects were revealed following the analysis of the cone b-waves, which were faster after CSDS in resilient mice specifically. In females, rod ERGs revealed age-related changes with no change in cone ERGs. Finally, our analysis suggests that baseline ERG can predict with an efficacy up to 71% the expression of susceptibility and resilience before stress exposition in males and females. Overall, our findings suggest that retinal activity is a valid biomarker of stress response that could potentially serve as a tool to predict whether males and females will become susceptible or resilient when facing CSDS.
重度抑郁症（MDD）是慢性应激最常见的后果之一。然而，目前尚无可靠的生物标志物来检测有患该病风险的个体。最近，视网膜成为一种利用视网膜电图（ERG）研究精神疾病的有效途径。在本研究中，对雄性和雌性C57BL/6小鼠在慢性社会挫败应激（CSDS）前后进行了视锥和视杆细胞ERG检测。然后将小鼠分为应激易感型或应激 resilient 型。我们的结果表明，CSDS降低了应激 resilient 型而非应激易感型雄性小鼠视杆细胞中振荡电位和a波的振幅。对视锥细胞b波的分析也显示了类似的效应，具体而言，CSDS后应激 resilient 型小鼠的视锥细胞b波更快。在雌性小鼠中，视杆细胞ERG显示出与年龄相关的变化，而视锥细胞ERG没有变化。最后，我们的分析表明，基线ERG在预测雄性和雌性小鼠在应激暴露前的易感性和 resilience 表达方面，有效率高达71%。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明，视网膜活动是应激反应的一个有效生物标志物，有可能作为一种工具来预测雄性和雌性在面对CSDS时是否会变得易感或 resilient 。
