Background
The dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampal formation, is an important brain region regulating the central response to stress. Given that stress resilience depends on genetics and adaptive processes within the brain, the question arises as to whether the acute stress response is modified by chronic environmental or pathological conditions. Therefore we investigated, on the one hand, whether environmental enrichment (EE), a housing condition suggested to promote stress resilience, alters the acute stress response. On the other hand, we assessed whether visceral inflammation, known to be exacerbated by stress, also has an impact on the central stress response.