Auditory cortex lesions do not disrupt habituation of HPA axis responses to repeated noise stress

Previous research has suggested that sensory areas may play a role in adaptation to repeated stress. The auditory cortex was the target of the present studies because it is a major projection area of the auditory thalamus, where functional inactivation disrupts stress habituation to repeated loud noise. Large bilateral excitotoxic lesions of the auditory cortex were made in male rats 2 weeks prior to (Experiment 1) or a few days after (Experiment 2) a 5 day 30 min repeated 95 dBA noise or no noise regimen. Blood was collected immediately after exposure on days 1, 3, and 5. Two weeks after the 5th exposure, the rats were retested with 30 min noise or no noise to determine retention of the habituated responses. Animals were killed immediately after the retest and trunk blood and brains collected for lesion verification. Plasma adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone levels were determined. In both experiments, significant between-subjects effects were found for noise (95 dBA or no noise) but not for surgery (lesion, sham, or no surgery control rats), with lesion groups exhibiting similar levels of ACTH and corticosterone across days as the sham and no surgery control groups. All noise exposed groups displayed similar habituation rates and retention levels. A third experiment indicated that similar auditory cortex lesions significantly disrupted background noise gap detection in an acoustic startle paradigm. Overall, these data suggest that the information mediating hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis response habituation to repeated loud noise exposures is not derived from the auditory cortex.