Word: cortisol
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...response to a stressful event may be useful to power an adaptive fight-or-flight response, but over the long term constant high blood pressure could raise a person's risk for heart attack and stroke. Studies have also found that consistently elevated levels of stress hormones, like cortisol, can lead to permanent damage in certain brain regions linked to depression...
Shively and her colleagues also knew that people who produce excessive amounts of the stress hormone cortisol tend to have bulky waistlines; they have apple-shaped bodies, rather than pear-shaped ones. So the researchers wanted to examine all these factors - stress, abdominal fat and health risk - in one study. The problem, of course, is that measuring the relationship between stress and visceral fat in people in a controlled fashion isn't easy. So the team turned to monkeys. For nearly 2½ years, she and her team fed the animals a typical Western diet, with 40% of calories coming...
...study aimed to gauge the stress impact of exposure to violence by testing the levels of cortisol—a hormone that is secreted at higher levels in high-stress situations—in each of the subjects. Suglia and his team took saliva samples in order to compare cortisol levels to parents’ descriptions of their children’s stress levels. They then analyzed differences in sleeping patterns, exposure to varying severities of violence, and degrees of worrying. The study concluded that there was a correlation between alterations in the body’s stress pathways, cortisol...
...Developmental Disorders showing that mothers who lived through a hurricane during their pregnancy - particularly at the mid-gestational point - had a greater likelihood of giving birth to an autistic child than other women. "What would be involved here would be the mother's level of [the stress hormone] cortisol," says Purpura. "Between fetus and mother, the placenta acts as a very good barrier for maternal cortisol, except when the stress is extreme...
...theory, that blast of stress chemistry could alter the development of the fetal locus coeruleus, though Purpura is quick to point out that the study showing how cortisol can make it through the placenta was conducted in animals, not humans. Nonetheless, one day after their article in Brain Research Reviews was published, the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology published a study linking cortisol imbalance to Asperger's syndrome, a condition along the autism spectrum...