Word: stressed
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...year later, the Ashburn, Va., man exercises regularly, takes hypertension medication, and has dropped his fast-food burger habit in favor of low-fat grilled chicken. He has a lower-stress job with the county department of family services and is the father of a new baby boy. "I'd like to be around for him," he says. His new blood pressure should help. It's 120/80...
...people, relaxation techniques such as yoga and meditation may help. Stress contributes to hypertension, in part by causing the release of cortisol and adrenaline, which in turn boost blood pressure. In one recent study at Yale University, volunteers in a small sample group showed measurable relaxation of arteries after sessions of yoga and meditation, although the improvement was not enough to eliminate elevated pressure. Doctors treating hypertension or prehypertension thus do not recommend relaxation as a substitute for diet, exercise and medication. As an adjunct, however--one more way to unknot the body--it may help...
Everyone knows that stress can make you age before your time--but everyone knows is folk wisdom, not science. What science has established so far is that people under chronic stress tend to have weak immune systems and run an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. But that doesn't necessarily prove that stressed-out people are actually aging prematurely, even if they look older than their years...
...important new study shows that folk wisdom and subjective judgment may, in this case, be right. Writing in last week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists reported that long-term, unrelenting stress on mothers can damage the DNA of their immune-system cells in a way that may speed up the aging process. "It's an immensely exciting result," says Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University cell biologist who wrote a commentary accompanying the report...
...study began when Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, asked her colleague Elizabeth Blackburn, a biochemist, whether anyone really knew why people under stress look haggard and old. "I told her, 'Nobody has any idea,'" recalls Blackburn. "And then I said, 'Let's have a look.'" They gathered a team of psychologists and biologists and recruited 58 women ranging in age from 20 to 50. Thirty-nine of the women were the primary caregivers for a child chronically ill with cerebral palsy, autism or some other serious disorder; the rest had healthy kids. The researchers...