Stress Hormones and Brain Injury

A recent study published in Cell Reports found that the stress hormone CRH may help injured brains repair themselves and avoid potential future complications.

This finding resulted from an investigation into a group of cells that had previously been recorded aggregating around the damaged portion of lab mice brains, following injections and similar sources of injury. The researchers behind those earlier observations didn’t know what the cells were, but a masters student intern at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry named Clemens Ries decided to look into the matter and discovered that they were oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, or OPCs. These cells mature into oligodendrocytes, which produce the myelin sheath that surrounds and protects the axons that allow neurons to communicate with each other in our brains.

This subject eventually became the topic of Ries’ doctoral thesis, and his later work showed that about a third of the OPCs surrounding brain injuries activate corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which is a hormone that helps regulate the body’s stress response. This was a new finding: researchers didn’t realize OPCs could produce neuropeptides like CRH.