Chronic Stress and Disease Risk
We tend to be notoriously bad reporters of what goes on in our lives. An imaginary experiment: ==take one hundred== lucky people and slip them a drug that will give them bad ==stomachaches== for a few days. Then send them to a doctor secretly participating in this experiment, who tells them that they have developed stomach ulcers. The doctor asks innocently, “Have things been particularly stressful for you recently?” Perhaps ninety of those subjects will come up with something or other putatively stressful to which they will now attribute the ulcer. In retrospective studies, people confronted with an illness are very likely to decide there were stressful events going on. When you rely heavily on ==retrospective studies== with humans, you are likely to get a falsely strong link between stress and disease; (Location 2649)
if you give an organism a massive stressor, it will reliably have a strong Stress-Response. With more subtle stressors, we have more subtle stress-responses. (Location 2658)
very high levels of Glucocorticoids will suppress levels of Estrogens in females and Testosterone in males, and certain types of cancers are stimulated by these hormones (most notably “estrogen-sensitive” forms of breast cancer and “androgen-sensitive” prostate cancers). In these cases, lots of Stress equals ==lots of glucocorticoids equals less estrogen or testosterone equals slower tumor growth.== (Location 2663)
see also
Tags: neurobiology science
Superlink: 051 ☣Neurobiology 050 🧠Neuroscience, 091 🏃Body and Medicine
Source
8 Immunity Stress and Diseases
Created: 16-09-22 16:27