New Alzheimer's Research -- Severe Stress 2 yrs. prior to being diagnosed ...
New Trigger of Alzheimer’s Identified: Stress
October 10, 2013
The study found that 72 percent—nearly three out of four—Alzheimer's patients
had experienced severe emotional stress during the two years preceding their
diagnosis. In the control group, only 26 percent, or one in four, had undergone
major stress or grief. Most of the stresses encountered by the Alzheimer’s group
involved:
- Bereavement; death of a spouse, partner, or child
- Violent experiences, such as assault or robbery
- Car accidents
- Financial problems, including “pension shock”
- Diagnosis of a family member’s severe illness
When you consider all the adverse biological effects that stress and anxiety
causes, it might not be such a stretch that severe stress could trigger
Alzheimer’s. For example, researchers have found links between emotional
distress and physical pain,3 chronic inflammation4
and even stillbirths.5
It can also wreak havoc on your gut health, which is critical to maintaining
mental and physical health. Most recently, Forbes6
reported the findings of a study7 exploring the role of stress in rewiring
your brain—in this case, altering your sense of smell:
“Two brain circuits that don’t typically “talk” to each other—one linked
to our sense of smell and another linked to emotional processing—can become
cross-wired when we experience stress-induced anxiety. The result is that
stressful experiences transform normally neutral odors into bad ones...
‘After anxiety induction, neutral smells become clearly negative,’
explains Wen Li, a professor of psychology at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison Waisman Center, who led the study. ‘People experiencing an
increase in anxiety show a decrease in the perceived pleasantness of odors. It
becomes more negative as anxiety increases.’”
How Stress Causes Disease
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