Stress, if prolonged for long periods of time, can cause significant psychological and physical damage. Staying in a state of constant tension and apprehension will present us with a steep bill.
Stress not only increases the risk of depression and anxiety, it also causes changes in the body that can trigger everything from heart disease to infectious ones. Stress inflammation is the main mechanism that triggers these problems.
Chronic stress forces the body to work at full speed
When we are exposed to a stressful situation, various neurochemical changes occur in our bodies. The discharge of various neurotransmitters and hormones activates the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to enable us to respond to the threat.
In this state, the levels of catecholamines, such as adrenaline and norepinephrine, skyrocket to increase heart rate and blood pressure. Thus our body prepares to fight or escape from danger. This reaction, called allostasis, is completely natural and adaptive. In fact, it is also beneficial for our survival.
However, when the stress is prolonged over time, the body enters a state of sustained allostasis that generates health problems. We must remember that there are different types of stress and they are not all negative. Acute stress can actually improve immune function, but cumulative or chronic stress causes imbalance and inflammation.
The mechanism of stress inflammation
A team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers has shown for the first time that chronic stress affects the body's ability to regulate inflammation, a mechanism that promotes the development and progression of several diseases.
In their first study, they recruited 276 healthy adults who were exposed to the virus that causes the common cold. The cold has been used because its symptoms are not caused directly by the virus, but are a "side effect" of the inflammatory response that is triggered in the body when the immune system works to fight the infection. Therefore, the greater the body's inflammatory response to the virus, the more likely cold symptoms are to occur.
The participants were kept in solitary confinement under controlled conditions, then the researchers followed them for five days looking for signs of the infection and disease. They found that prolonged stress was associated with the inability of immune cells to respond to hormonal signals that normally regulate inflammation. As a result, people who were unable to adequately regulate the inflammatory response were more likely to develop a cold when exposed to the virus.
In a second study, the researchers worked with 79 healthy people, broken down by their ability to regulate the inflammatory response. Each participant was then exposed to the cold virus and the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, the chemical messengers that trigger the inflammatory response in the body, was monitored. On this occasion, the researchers found that those who had difficulty regulating the inflammatory response before being exposed to the virus produced more chemical messengers that induce inflammation when they became infected.
This means that "the immune system's ability to regulate inflammation predicts who will develop a cold, but more importantly, it explains how stress can promote disease," the researchers noted.
In practice, when we are subjected to situations of great stress, the cells of our immune system do not respond to hormonal control and, consequently, trigger a level of inflammation that favors the disease. We can't forget that inflammation is largely regulated by cortisol, but when stress prevents this hormone from performing this function, inflammation can get out of control.
Therefore, prolonged stress alters the effectiveness of cortisol in regulating the inflammatory response, decreasing the sensitivity of tissues to this hormone. Specifically, immune cells become insensitive to the regulatory effect of cortisol because they have been too exposed to this hormone. This explains the inflammation in the body due to stress, which, among other things, also affects the brain and can end up causing neurodegenerative diseases.
