Implications of the Functional Integration of Adult-Born Hippocampal Neurons in Anxiety-Depression Disorders:

Adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus has gained considerable attention as a cellular substrate for both the pathophysiology and treatment of depression. Overall, the studies of adult hippocampal neurogenesis are still in their infancy because most of them explore only one stage of this process. Importantly, given the built-in homeostatic mechanisms that act at each stage during the progression from stem cells to mature neurons (proliferation, differentiation, maturation, survival), it is very difficult to extrapolate the efficiency of a drug on adult neurogenesis from analysis of one stage alone. Here, we review the most significant data on hippocampal neurogenesis, focusing on the importance of studying each stage of adult hippocampal neurogenesis and also on the importance of choosing the appropriate mouse strain to perform the experiment. Specifically, strains with a high number of basal proliferating cells in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus should be used only under stressed...