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Review
. 2020 Jul;50(4):653-662.
doi: 10.1016/j.cvsm.2020.03.001. Epub 2020 Apr 27.

Stress and Feline Health

C A Tony Buffington  1 , Melissa Bain  2
Affiliations
Review

Stress and Feline Health

C A Tony Buffington et al. Vet Clin North Am Small Anim Pract. 2020 Jul.

Abstract

In the health sciences, stress often is defined in terms of stressors; events that are perceived as threats to one's perception of control. From this perspective, a stressor is anything that activates the central threat response system (CTRS). Recent research shows that the CTRS can be sensitized to environmental events through epigenetic modulation of gene expression. When CTRS activation is chronic, health and welfare may be harmed. Environmental modification can mitigate the harmful effects of chronic CTRS activation by reducing the individual's perception of threat and increasing its perception of control, which improves health and welfare.

Keywords: Coping; Early life stress; Epigenetic modulation of gene expression; Perception of control; Perception of threat; Resilience; Threat response system.

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Conflict of interest statement

Disclosure The authors have nothing to disclose.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The “circle of behavior” illustrating how animals sense and respond to events in the environment. Starting at the top, when an animal acts (e.g., a cat jumps up onto a counter), the environment may respond (e.g., a shout or swat from a person to remove the cat from the counter). The sensations arising in the cats nervous system enter the cat’s brain to form a perception of the response, which is then compared to events in the cat’s history (genetic,epigenetic and environmental), the context in which the response was received, and its expectation of future events. These result in subsequent acts, depending on the threat or reward potential of the response. The circle is completed on a time constant of milliseconds throughout the life of the animal.
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