Repeated stress exposure leads to structural synaptic instability prior to disorganization of hippocampal coding and impairments in learning

Stress exposure impairs brain structure and function, resulting in cognitive deficits and increased risk for psychiatric disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. In particular, stress exposure affects function and structure of hippocampal CA1 leading to impairments in episodic memory. Here, we applied longitudinal deep-brain optical imaging to investigate the link between changes in activity patterns and structural plasticity of dorsal CA1 pyramidal neurons and hippocampal-dependent learning and memory in mice exposed to stress. We found that several days of repeated stress led to a substantial increase in neuronal activity followed by disruption of the temporal structure of this activity and spatial coding. We then tracked dynamics of structural excitatory connectivity as a potential underlying cause of the changes in activity induced by repeated stress. We thus discovered that exposure to repeated stress leads to an immediate decrease in spinogenesis followed by decrease in spine stability. By comparison, acute stress led to stabilization of the spines born in temporal proximity to the stressful event. Importantly, the temporal relationship between changes in activity levels, structural connectivity and activity patterns, suggests that loss of structural connectivity mediates the transition between increased activity and impairment of temporal organization and spatial information content in dorsal CA1 upon repeated stress exposure.