Restraint stress modulates sensory evoked potentials

The present experiment investigated whether repeated exposure to an acute stressor elicits changes in sensory evoked responses recorded from awake rats. Animals were restrained for four hours per day on each of four consecutive days. Recordings were obtained on the day prior to the first restraint and following the first and fourth day of restraint. Restraint generally resulted in an increase in the amplitude of sensory evoked responses recorded from the medial basal hypothalamus (MBH), dorsal hippocampus (DH), and superior colliculus (SC) without changing any other characteristics of the recording. A persistent increase in the averaged evoked response amplitudes seen on both the first and fourth daily presentation of the stressor indicates that no significant adaptation to the stressor occurred over this time period as measured electrophysiologically.