| Summary: | The investigation of the relationship between neural measures of limbic structures and
hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis responses to acute stress exposure in healthy young adults
has so far focused in particular on task-based and resting state functional connectivity studies.
Thus, the present study examined the association between limbic volume and thickness
measures and acute cortisol responses to the psychosocial stress paradigm ScanSTRESS.
Using Permutation Analysis of Linear Models controlling for sex, age, and total brain volume,
the associations between (sex-specific) cortisol increases and human connectome project
style anatomical variables of limbic structures (i.e., volume and thickness) were investigated
in 66 healthy and young (18-33 years) subjects (35 men, 31 women taking oral contraceptives).
In addition, exploratory (sex-specific) bivariate correlations between cortisol increases and
structural measures were conducted. The present data provide interesting new insights into
the involvement of striato-limbic structures in psychosocial stress processing, suggesting that
acute cortisol stress responses are also associated with mere structural measures of the
human brain. Thus, our pre-liminary findings suggest that not only situation- and contextdependent reactions of the limbic system (i.e., blood oxygenation level dependent reactions)
are related to acute (sex-specific) cortisol stress responses, but also basal and somewhat more
constant structural measures. Our study hereby paves the way for further analyses in this
context and highlights the relevance of the topic.
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