Kortison, stress og betennelser
En kjempeinteressant ny studie blir diskutert her http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012...ause-illness/1 "Stress and illness: The decades-long search for a link"
Sitat:
In a 2007 review of psychological stress published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Cohen said: “Despite widespread public belief that psychological stress leads to disease, the biomedical community remains [sceptical] of this conclusion.” But speaking now, little more than half a decade later, he takes a rather more positive view. There’s been a shift, he says. A plausible mechanism to explain the effects stress will reinforce it.
The issue is how you design an experiment that proves any ill-effects are caused by stress. Up until now, the real hard evidence has had to come from animal studies. “With humans you can bring them to a lab and expose them to stress, and you can get elevations in heart rate and blood pressure,” he says. Physiological changes, in other words, that often play a role in disease. But, for ethical reasons what you can’t do is give human subjects an illness and see if stress makes it worse
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“We know that stress, acutely and chronically, increases inflammation,” says Steptoe. If Cohen is right, we now know how. Stress reduces the sensitivity of the receptors (in effect chemical switches) which are supposed to control the level of inflammation in the body.
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Colds may be unpleasant but, in the scheme of things, they’re hardly a big deal. So what of more serious disease? The real importance of the work, says Cohen, lies in its relevance to the many other conditions in which inflammation is a factor. “It’s a model that can be applied to many diseases. Cardiovascular disease, asthma, autoimmune disease, diabetes…The regulation of inflammation plays a big role in the progression of all of them.”
Steptoe agrees. “People are already interested in inflammation in relation to chronic diseases such as diabetes and coronary heart disease,” he says. And Phil Evans too joins the chorus of acceptance. Cohen’s conclusions, he says, are “potentially generalisable to a range of other inflammatory illnesses”.
Her er forskningen http://www.pnas.org/content/early/20...55109.abstract
