Concurrent psychological stress and infectious colitis is key to sustaining enhanced peripheral sensory signaling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The development of postinfectious-irritable bowel syndrome is associated with psychological stress but this relationship is poorly understood. The mouse Citrobacter rodentium model enhances the postinfectious excitability of colonic nociceptors, which can be further amplified by water-avoidance stress (WAS). This study tested whether concurrent infectious colitis and chronic stress enhance and sustain nociceptor excitability more than stress after resolution of infection. METHODS: Male C57 mice were gavaged with C. rodentium. WAS (1 h/day) was performed at different time-points relative to the infection. After the final session of WAS, T9-T13 colonic-projecting DRG neurons were isolated, cultured overnight and patch-clamped to assess excitability. To investigate potential mechanisms, histological damage scores and colonic cytokine production were assessed. KEY RESULTS: WAS more than 30 days after C. rodentium infection produced no greater DRG excitability than WAS in uninfected mice. However, when overlapped with chronic stress (3 sessions of WAS; 7 days before, 9 days during and 9 days after C. rodentium or sham gavage), C. rodentium significantly enhanced DRG excitability vs saline-gavaged chronically stressed mice. Bodyweights and colonic damage scores were unchanged. Both WAS and C. rodentium gavage were found to significantly alter colonic cytokines at postinfection day 30. CONCLUSIONS & INFERENCES: Chronic stress and infectious colitis combine in an additive manner to heighten and prolong the sensitivity of visceral nociceptors. The effect relies on temporal coincidence of stress and infection, does not involve substantial exacerbation of inflammation, and may involve combined direct stress hormone and immune signaling on DRG neurons.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".