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Chapter 8: Immunity, Stress, and Disease
Psychoneuroimmunologist: someone who studies the fact that what goes on in your head can affect how well your immune system functions
There is a strong link between the nervous system and the immune system
The immune system
How does stress inhibit immune functioning?
Can stress enhance the immune system?
Chronic stress and disease risk
Social support and social isolation
Stress can increase the likelihood of someone getting the common cold, herpes or even developing AIDS in cases of HIV positive individuals. Overall, stress can increase the likelihood, the severity, or both of some immune-related diseases.
What does stress have to do with getting cancer?
*CRH: corticotropin-releasing hormone
Resources: Sapolsky, R. Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. New York (NY): Henry Holt and Company. 2004 3rd edition
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Chapter 1: Why Don’t Zebras Get Ulcers?
This book is focused on stress, stress-related disease, and the mechanisms of coping with stress.
Our personalities, thoughts and feelings reflect and influence our bodies. Stress can make us sick: many of the damaging diseases of slow accumulation can be either caused or made worse by stress.
Stress for us vs stress for zebras:
For the vast majority of beings on this planet, stress is about short-term crisis. It is only damaging once it’s provoked chronically.
Stressor and stress response:
Hans Selye: through research with rats, he came to the conclusion that if stressors go on for too long, they can make you sick.
Allostasis: the modified, modernized version of the homeostasis concept:
Regardless of the stressor (injured, starving, too hot, too cold, or psychologically stressed), you turn on the same stress-response:
Chapter 2: Glands, Gooseflesh, and Hormones
The brain sends messages to your body through the nerves that branch from your brain down your spine and out to the periphery of your body.
One half of the autonomic nervous system is activated in response to stress, one half is suppressed
There is another way, besides the sympathetic system, that can mobilize activity in response to a stressor: the secretion of hormones
The hypothalamus contains a huge array of releasing and inhibiting hormones which instruct the pituitary, which in turn regulates the secretions of the peripheral glands
As the master gland, the brain can experience or think of something stressful and activate components of the stress-response hormonally
Glucocorticoid secretion:
Other hormones:
Chapter 3: Stroke, Heart Attacks, and Voodoo Death
In moments of crisis, for example when you have to run very fast, you have to increase your cardiovascular output. This is done by:
Once the threat is over:
How does stress-induced elevation of blood pressure during chronic psychological stress wind up causing cardiovascular disease?
How can you measure the amount of inflammatory damage?
Kaplan: monkeys under social stress are most at risk for plaque
.....read moreChapter 4: Liquidating your assets
In cases of crisis (e.g. running away from a lion), your cardiovascular system kicks into high gear and is delivering oxygen and energy to your exercising muscles.
Where does the extra energy come from?
Why do we get sick?
Juvenile diabetes
Chapter 5: Ulcers, the Runs, and Hot Fudge Sundaes
Stress and food consumption
Storing food
Bowel movements
Chapter 8: Immunity, Stress, and Disease
Psychoneuroimmunologist: someone who studies the fact that what goes on in your head can affect how well your immune system functions
There is a strong link between the nervous system and the immune system
The immune system
How does stress inhibit immune functioning?
Can stress enhance the immune system?
Chapter 13: Why is Psychological Stress Stressful?
Some psychological factors can trigger a stress-response on their own or make another stressor seem more stressful.
Outlet
Experiment of Jay Weiss: rats that are under stress who are given an outlet for their frustration are less likely to get ulcers than stressed rats who are not given an outlet.
Social support
Predictability
Control
A perception of things worsening
Some subtleties of predictability
Chapter 15: Personality, Temperament, and Their Stress-Related Consequences
People differ in their ways of modulating stress-responses with psychological variables:
Primates are strongly individualistic and there are astonishing differences in their personalities, temperaments, and coping styles.
Psychiatric disorders and abnormal stress-responses:
Type A and cardiovascular diseases
Repressive personality and stress
Resources: Sapolsky,
.....read moreChapter 17: A view from the bottom
Poor health can be caused by our bad living situations and our position in society (pollution, no heat in winter, overcrowded apartment etc.)
Once social groups in animals have been established, those who are lower ranking become more chronically stressed (in most cases). This is mainly caused by lack of control, predictability and outlets for frustration.
While rank is an important predictor of individual differences in stress-response, the meaning of the rank for the individual and the psychological baggage that accompanies it in a society is just as important.
Do humans have ranks?
Low socioeconomic status
Being poor vs feeling poor
Resources: Sapolsky, R. Why
.....read moreChapter 18: Managing stress
Consider the physiological studies of people carrying out dangerous, stressful tasks (e.g. parachuting). The studies show the same pattern: most people have stress-responses but a subset is physiologically unflustered.
Questions of this chapter: Who makes up that subset that can cope? How do they do it? And how can we?
Successful aging
Coping with illness and learned helplessness
Stress management lessons from baboons
Applying principles of dealing with psychological stress
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