Word: stressed
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Joining her call for intervention is Sheldon Cohen, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University and author of a commentary, which also appears in the current issue of JAMA and examines the effects of psychological stress on a variety of major diseases. Cohen's review of past studies finds that stress - particularly "social stressors" like divorce and the death of a loved one - often triggers clinical depression or worsens it, and causes relapses in people who have recovered. The report also suggests that stress may quicken the progress of the disease in AIDS patients, and, like the Canadian study, finds...
...problem is that many doctors don't have the time to ask. Highly specialized physicians like cardiologists and oncologists are busy, and few of them have time for long, leisurely doctor-patient conversations. "It's ironic that as we're getting a broader picture of how important stress levels are to physical health, we're simultaneously cramming appointments into shorter and shorter periods of time," says Dr. Daniel Brotman, director of the Hospitalist Program at Johns Hopkins Hospital and author of a review paper on emotional stress and heart health, which was published in the September issue of The Lancet...
There are a number of ways that stress can recalibrate our physical machinery. For starters, stressed-out people tend to neglect their health in general - they eat poorly, sleep badly, don't exercise and smoke and drink too much - behaviors that don't exactly promote well-being. Stress also triggers the body's endocrine systems, prompting the release of hormones that play out in the body in a variety of ways: they might, for instance, irritate lymphatic tissue that in turn alters our immune functions, or they might simply cause the resting heart to beat faster. "Anybody who has almost...
...still, many patients fail to acknowledge that those threats exist. For some, admitting to stress feels like a sign of weakness; others resign themselves to it, as if it were an unavoidable dimension of life. So most of us simply carry on with our 15-hour workdays and fraught relationships. In another study published in the October 8 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers at the University College of London followed a group of about 9,000 civil servants for 12 years and found that people who experienced negative close relationships - marked by conflict and fighting...
...stressful job or a bad relationship may not send all of us into depression or to the ER - statistically speaking, most of us weather the stresses of life just fine - but for now it's impossible for doctors to predict who will be susceptible and who won't. So, whether it's a matter of quality of life, or life and death, it's probably good advice for the stressed-out folk among us to take a breather now and again. "With chronic stress, we may not feel it in our cardiovascular systems, but we do feel drained," says Brotman...