Work Stress and Heart Health

An August 2024 study by Laval University in Quebec City said,

• “Our study suggests that work-related stressors may be relevant factors to include in preventive strategies,”

• “Recognizing and addressing psychosocial stressors at work are required to foster healthy work environments that benefit both individuals and the organizations where they work.”

• “The effectiveness of workplace interventions to reduce psychosocial stressors that may also reduce the risk of AFib should be investigated in future research efforts,”

• “Our research team previously conducted an organizational intervention designed to reduce psychosocial stressors at work, which was shown to effectively reduce blood pressure levels. Examples of organizational changes implemented during the intervention included slowing down the implementation of a large project to prevent increased workload; implementing flexible work hours; and holding meetings between managers and employees to discuss day-to-day challenges.”

Boundaries

“In the final analysis, disease itself is a boundary question. When we look at the research that predicts who is likely to become ill, we find that the people at greatest risk are those who experienced the most severe boundary invasions before they were able to construct an autonomous sense of self.”

Gabor Mate

“When the Body Says No: the Hidden Cost of Stress’

Stress-induced Exhaustion

In a June 2024 study by Uppsala University, it was said,

• “There are no established evidence-based models for the psychological treatment of stress-induced exhaustion disorder. The concepts of ‘recovery’ and ‘stress’ are so widely accepted in our current era that it is difficult to examine them critically. It’s easy to think that patients with stress-related exhaustion should prioritise rest and relaxation, but an overly one-sided focus on recovery can lead to a passive existence that it’s easy to get stuck in and can instead become harmful over time,”

• “We shoot with everything we have, hoping to hit something, but we don’t know what really helped. With so many people experiencing stress-related exhaustion, it becomes a problem that the standard treatment is so extensive. The treatments used to last up to one year when I started – now we are working on a 12-week digital programme,”

• “Despite being a small study, the results show similar effects to our previous six-month treatment programme, using only a quarter of the clinical resources. This means that the treatment can be made available to more patients in the healthcare system,”

• "Given the widespread incidence of mental ill health, we need better models to understand why people feel stressed. Our results indicate that treatment for stress-induced exhaustion disorder may be more effective with a different focus. While further studies are necessary, this may be a first small step towards a more theoretically grounded approach to clinically treating stress-related exhaustion,"

Stress and Cognition

In a May 2024 study by the Karolinska Institutet it was found,

• “These results might have clinical implications as an expanding body of research suggests that mindfulness exercises and meditation may reduce cortisol levels and improve cognition,”

• “Different stress management strategies could be a good complement to existing lifestyle interventions in Alzheimer’s prevention.”

• “We will continue to study the association between stress and sleeping disorders and how it affects the cognitive reserve in memory clinic patients,”

Reference

“Cognitive reserve, cortisol, and Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers: a memory clinic study”, Manasa Shanta Yerramalla, Alexander Darin-Mattsson, Chinedu T Udeh-Momoh, Jasper Holleman, Ingemar Kåreholt, Malin Aspö, Göran Hagman, Miia Kivipelto, Alina Solomon, Anna Marseglia, Shireen Sindi, Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association, online 4 June 2024, doi: 10.1002/alz.13866.

Stress and Wellbeing

A February 2024 study by the University of Bath said,

• “We found a convincing link between mental and physical ill-health, and the way a person typically views stressful situations,”

• “The more you’re able to appraise a stressful situation as a challenge, the more likely you are to report good health and wellbeing.”

• “Researchers have speculated for the past 15 years that people who repeatedly believe they don’t have the resources to cope in stressful situations are putting their health at risk, but we believe this is the first time the theory has been properly tested, leading to us finding a link between stress appraisals and health.”

• “Most people will fluctuate in the way they appraise a situation, depending on the details of the specific situation, however, some people are far more likely to appraise all stressful situations as a threat, and this study shows that this tendency is associated with poorer health and wellbeing.”

Stress, inflammation and Metabolic Syndrome

A January 2024 study by Ohio State University said,

• “We were specifically examining people in midlife – a time that is critical to determine those who will experience accelerated aging. Stress is an important contributor to several negative health outcomes as we age,”

• “There are many variables that influence metabolic syndrome, some we can’t modify, but others that we can. Everybody experiences stress,”

• “And stress management is one modifiable factor that’s cost-effective as well as something people can do in their daily lives without having to get medical professionals involved.”

• “There’s not much research that has looked at all three variables at one time,” said Jurgens, a psychology graduate student in Hayes’ lab. “There’s a lot of work that suggests stress is associated with inflammation, inflammation is associated with metabolic syndrome, and stress is associated with metabolic syndrome. But putting all those pieces together is rare.”

• Inflammation composite scores were calculated using biomarkers that included the better-known IL-6 and C-reactive protein as well as E-selectin and ICAM-1, which help recruit white blood cells during inflammation, and fibrinogen, a protein essential to blood clot formation.

• The statistical modeling showed that stress does indeed have a relationship with metabolic syndrome, and inflammation explained over half of that connection – 61.5%, to be exact.

• “There is a small effect of perceived stress on metabolic syndrome, but inflammation explained a large proportion of that,”

• “People think of stress as mental health, that it’s all psychological. It is not. There are real physical effects to having chronic stress,”

• “It could be inflammation, it could be metabolic syndrome, or a number of things. This is another reminder of that.”

PTSD; Levels of glucocorticoid

A November 2023 Study by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne said,

• “There are considerable differences in the levels of glucocorticoids that individuals release to the bloodstream when stressed,”

• “Low glucocorticoid levels are frequently observed in PTSD patients following trauma exposure and were initially suspected to be a consequence of trauma exposure.”

• “The possibility that this could be a trait constituting a preexisting PTSD risk factor has been an outstanding open question for many years, but tackling it has been challenging due to the difficulties of both collecting biological measures before trauma exposure, and having access to relevant animal models in which the causal role of these traits can be investigated.”

• “Our study provides causal evidence of a direct implication of low glucocorticoid responsiveness in the development of PTSD symptomatology following exposure to traumatic experiences, i.e., impaired fear extinction,”

• “In addition, it shows that low glucocorticoids are causally implicated in the determination of other risk factors and symptoms that were until now only independently related to PTSD.”

• “In a nutshell, we present mechanistic evidence – previously missing – that having low glucocorticoids such as cortisol in humans is a condition for causally predisposed individuals to present all to-date vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, and causally involved in deficits to extinguish traumatic memories.”

chronic stress and hair loss

A March 2021 study (of mice) by Harvard University was, 

"interested in understanding how stress affects stem cell biology and tissue biology, spurred in part by the fact that everyone has a story to share about what happens to their skin and hair when they are stressed. I realized that as a skin stem cell biologist, I could not provide a satisfying answer regarding if stress indeed has an impact -- and more importantly, if yes, what are the mechanisms," 

"The skin offers a tractable and accessible system to study this important problem in depth, and in this work, we found that stress does actually delay stem cell activation and fundamentally changes how frequently hair follicle stem cells regenerate tissues."

"This result suggests that elevated stress hormones indeed have a negative effect on hair follicle stem cells," 

"But the real surprise came when we took out the source of the stress hormones."

"So even the baseline level of stress hormone that's normally circulating in the body is an important regulator of the resting phase. Stress essentially just elevates this preexisting 'adrenal gland-hair follicle axis,' making it even more difficult for hair follicle stem cells to enter the growth phase to regenerate new hair follicles," 

"We first asked whether the stress hormone was regulating the stem cells directly and checked by taking out the receptor for corticosterone, but this turned out to be wrong. Instead, we found that the stress hormone actually acts on a cluster of dermal cells underneath the hair follicle, known as the dermal papilla," 

"Under both normal and stress conditions, adding Gas6 was sufficient to activate hair follicle stem cells that were in the resting phase and to promote hair growth,”

"In the future, the Gas6 pathway could be exploited for its potential in activating stem cells to promote hair growth. It will also be very interesting to explore if other stress-related tissue changes are related to the stress hormone's impact on regulating Gas6."

"When looking for factors that control stem cell behaviors, normally we would look locally in the skin. While there are important local factors, our findings suggest that the major switch for hair follicle stem cell activity is actually far away in the adrenal gland and it works by changing the threshold required for stem cell activation,”

"You can have systemic control of stem cell behavior located in a different organ that plays a really important role, and we are learning more and more examples of these 'cross-organ interactions.' Tissue biology is interconnected with body physiology. We still have so much to learn in this area, but we are constantly reminded by our findings that in order to understand stem cells in the skin, we often need to think beyond the skin."

Nutrition and Anxiety

A February 2020 study by the University of Toronto and the University of Edmonton said,

• "For those who consumed less than 3 sources of fruits and vegetables daily, there was at least at 24% higher odds of anxiety disorder diagnosis."

• "This may also partly explain the findings associated with body composition measures. As levels of total body fat increased beyond 36%, the likelihood of anxiety disorder was increased by more than 70%."

• "Increased body fat may be linked to greater inflammation. Emerging research suggests that some anxiety disorders can be linked to inflammation.”

• "Our findings are in keeping with previous research which has also indicated that women are more vulnerable to anxiety disorders than men."

• "We were not surprised to find that those in poverty had such a high prevalence of anxiety disorders; struggling to afford basics such as food and housing causes relentless stress and is inherently anxiety inducing."

• "Chronic pain and multiple health conditions make life very unpredictable and can be anxiety producing. One never knows whether health problems will interfere with work or family responsibilities and many activities become more challenging and time consuming."

• "Immigrants may face a myriad of challenges associated with resettling in a new country, including language barriers, poverty, difficulties in getting qualifications recognized, and limited social support, so it seems counter-intuitive that they should have a lower likelihood of anxiety disorders than those born in Canada. It may be that potential immigrants with anxiety disorders would find the challenges of relocation too anxiety-inducing and would therefore not choose to immigrate, so there is a 'self-selection' for those with lower anxiety."

• "It is estimated that 10% of the global population will suffer from anxiety disorders which are a leading cause of disability … Our findings suggest that comprehensive approaches that target health behaviors, including diet, as well as social factors, such as economic status, may help to minimize the burden of anxiety disorders among middle-aged and older adults, including immigrants."