Aging reprograms the response to chronic stress

Abstract

Chronic stress is thought to accelerate brain aging. We find this to be true in the brains of young mice, but reversed in the old. Using chronic variable stress in young (2-month) and aged (24-month) mice, we show that aged animals perceive stress physiologically but exhibit stress-responses that differ from those of young mice on behavioral, synaptic, and molecular levels. Multi-Omics profiling of prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens and 3D vasculature measurements reveals that stress in aged mice activates angiogenic programs that oppose aging-related patterns. Our results demonstrate that stress cannot be universally conceptualized as an aging accelerator, but instead engages age-specific programs with opposite directionality in young and old animals.