Environmental enrichment as an intervention for adverse health outcomes of prenatal stress

Should be able to be applied to the stress and resiliency needed from your stroke.
I know if you read Jill Bolte-Taylors' book or saw her on video, she highly recommended not having much sensory stimulation at all because it caused her to shut down. To each his or her own,
http://eep.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/3/dvw013.abstract

J. Keiko McCreary, Gerlinde A.S. Metz

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/eep/dvw013 dvw013 First published online: 6 August 2016

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Abstract

Prenatal stress (PS) has complex neurological, behavioural and physiological consequences for the developing offspring. The phenotype linked to PS usually lasts into adulthood and may even propagate to subsequent generations. The often uncontrollable exposure to maternal stress and the lasting consequences emphasize the urgent need for treatment strategies that effectively reverse stress programming. Exposure to complex beneficial experiences, such as environmental enrichment (EE), is one of the most powerful therapies to promote neuroplasticity and behavioural performance at any time in life. A small number of studies have previously used EE to postnatally treat consequences of PS in the attempt to reverse deficits that were primarily induced in utero. This review discusses the available data on postnatal EE exposure in prenatally stressed individuals. The goal is to determine if EE is a suitable treatment option that reverses adverse consequences of stress programming and enhances stress resiliency. Moreover, this review discusses data with respect to relevant hypotheses including the cumulative stress and the mismatch hypotheses. The articles included in this review emphasize that EE reverses most behavioural, physiological and neural deficits associated with PS. Differing responses may be dependent on the timing and variability of stress and EE, exercise, and potentially vulnerable and resilient phenotypes of PS. Results from this study suggest that enrichment may provide an effective therapy for clinical populations suffering from the effects of PS or early life trauma.

• maternal stress
• pregnancy
• enriched environment
• mismatch hypothesis
• hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis
• HPA axis
• stress response
• stress vulnerability
• stress resilience

• © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

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