Studies of dendritic morphological changes indicate that elevation of stress hormones in layer II-III of the prefrontal cortex causes no observable change in the structure or distribution of basal dendrites. The apical dendrites, however, show a significant redistribution in stress-hormone treated animal brains, which is measured using Scholl analysis. Scholl analysis estimates the amount and distributions of dendrite material by counting numbers of intersections of dendrites with an overlay of concentric rings centered at the soma. Medial prefrontal cortex layer II-III pyramidal neurons showed significant reorganization with a 21% increase in proximal apical dendrite arbors and a decrease of 58% in distal apical dendrite arbors. These results are in contrast to the changes in the hippocampal CA3 dendritic arbors, in which only regressive changes were observed. One possible explanation proposed in these studies is that the atrophy of distal dendrites in II-III layer pyramidal neurons results directly from the loss of input from changed CA3 pyramidal neurons, as both CA1 and CA3 project directly into the medial prefrontal cortex.