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. 2018 Mar 19;11:18. doi: 10.1186/s13041-018-0356-9

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© The Author(s). 2018

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 1 — The HPA axis and the main hormones secreted by each gland in the axis. CRH: corticotropin releasing hormone. ACTH: adrenocorticotropic hormone. A stressor (e.g., a threat to the life of the organism) triggers the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus to synthesize and secrete CRH, which binds to specific receptors in the anterior pituitary. This stimulates the synthesis and release of ACTH which is released into the circulatory system. ACTH triggers the synthesis and secretion of glucocorticoids (cortisol in humans/corticosterone in rodents) from the adrenal cortex