stress
Can Childhood Stress Affect the Immune System?
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Katie Ehrlich
Credit: Alan Flurry, University of Georgia, Athens
Whether it’s growing up in gut-wrenching poverty, dealing with dysfunctional family dynamics, or coping with persistent bullying in school, extreme adversity can shatter a child’s sense of emotional well-being. But does it also place kids at higher of developing heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions as adults?
Katherine Ehrlich, a researcher at University of Georgia, Athens, wants to take a closer look at this question. She recently received a 2018 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to study whether acute or chronic psychosocial stress during childhood might sensitize the body’s immune system to behave in ways that damage health, possibly over the course of a lifetime.
Researchers Elucidate Role of Stress Gene in Chronic Pain
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Getty Images/simonkr
For most people, pain eventually fades away as an injury heals. But for others, the pain persists beyond the initial healing and becomes chronic, hanging on for weeks, months, or even years. Now, we may have uncovered an answer to help explain why: subtle differences in a gene that controls how the body responds to stress.
In a recent study of more than 1,600 people injured in traffic accidents, researchers discovered that individuals with a certain variant in a stress-controlling gene, called FKBP5, were more likely to develop chronic pain than those with other variants [1]. These findings may point to new non-addictive strategies for preventing or controlling chronic pain, and underscore the importance of NIH-funded research for tackling our nation’s opioid overuse crisis.
Creative Minds: Helping More Kids Beat Anxiety Disorders
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Dylan Gee
While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Dylan Gee often encountered children and adolescents battling phobias, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders. Most overcame them with the help of psychotherapy. But not all of the kids did, and Gee spent many an hour brainstorming about how to help her tougher cases, often to find that nothing worked.
What Gee noticed was that so many of the interventions she pondered were based on studies in adults. Little was actually known about the dramatic changes that a child’s developing brain undergoes and their implications for coping under stress. Gee, an assistant professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT, decided to dedicate her research career to bridging the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical interventions to treat children and adolescents with persistent anxiety and stress-related disorders.
Anxiety Reduction: Exploring the Role of Cannabinoid Receptors
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Cannabinoid receptor 1 (green) in the mouse brain. All cell nuclei appear blue.
Credit: Margaret Davis, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, NIH
Relief of anxiety and stress is one of the most common reasons that people give for using marijuana [1]. But the scientific evidence is rather sparse about whether there’s a biological explanation for that effect.
More than a decade ago, researchers set out to explore the link between marijuana and anxiety reduction, but the results of their experiments were inconclusive [2]. Recently, a team led by NIH-funded researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville decided to tackle the question again, this time using more sensitive tools that have just become available in recent years.
Creative Minds: Making Sense of Stress and the Brain
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Amy Arnsten
Credit: Terry Dagradi, Yale School of Medicine
Right behind your forehead lies the most recently evolved region of the human brain: the prefrontal cortex (PFC). It’s a major control center for abstract thinking, thought analysis, working memory, planning, decision making, regulating emotions, and many of the things we most strongly associate with being human. But in times of stress, the PFC is literally taken offline, allowing more primitive parts of the brain to take over.
Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, has pioneered the study of stress on the brain [1] and how impaired regulation of stress response in the PFC contributes to neurological disorders, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia [2, 3], and Alzheimer’s disease [4]. In these disorders, cells in the PFC are negatively affected, while those in the primary sensory cortex, a more primitive part of the brain that processes vision and sound, are thought to remain relatively unscathed. With support from a 2013 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, Arnsten hopes to uncover why the PFC is more vulnerable to disease than the primary sensory cortex—and how we might be able to prevent or reverse damage to these circuits.
