Balanced Immune Health

(Editor’s note: During this football bowl season we figured why not go wide and go deep. So Embria Health Science’s Dr. Stuart Reeves has thrown a long ball: an great overview of a meta-analysis of how stress can impact immune health. As you’ll read, there are so many long-term implications for physical health when psychological factors enter into a person’s life. Anyone who wants to read the whole study can click here)

Many of us are under stress at the moment, due to the credit crunch, fear of job loss and the recession. Did you know that such stresses can adversely affect your immune system? In an extensive survey of published studies, Suzanne Segerstrom and Gregory Miller showed stress can affect both sides of the immune system. “Threats” that do not require a physical response (e.g., academic exams, public speaking, and chronic stress) may therefore have physical consequences, including changes in the immune system. More than 300 studies have been done on stress and immunity in humans, and together they have shown that psychological challenges are capable of modifying various features of the immune response.

In the studies they use five categories of stressors:

Acute time-limited stressors involve challenges such as public speaking or mental arithmetic.

Brief naturalistic stressors such as academic examinations, involve a person confronting a real-life, short-term challenge.

In stressful event sequences, a focal event, such as the loss of a spouse or a major natural disaster, gives rise to a series of related challenges. Although affected individuals usually do not know exactly when these challenges will subside, they have a clear sense that at some point in the future they will.

Chronic stressors, unlike the other demands we have described, usually pervade a person’s life, forcing him or her to restructure his or her identity or social roles. Another feature of chronic stressors is their stability—the person either does not know whether or when the challenge will end. An example of a chronic stressor is suffering a traumatic injury that leads to physical disability.

Distant stressors are traumatic experiences that occurred in the distant past yet have the potential to continue modifying immune system function because of their long-lasting cognitive and emotional results. Examples of distant stressors include having been sexually assaulted as a child or having witnessed the death of a fellow soldier during combat.

Their analysis shows that chronic stress is linked with both with reduced disease resistance (inadequate immunity) and diseases linked with excessive immune activity (allergic and autoimmune disease). This shows that chronic stress shifts the balance of the immune response. The most well-known model suggests that chronic stress elicits simultaneous enhancement and suppression of the immune response by altering patterns of immune messenger molecules, thus unbalancing the immune system.

Filed under Bacterial Environments, Immune Balance, Immune System, Research, Stress, Stress-Related Illness, Uncategorized, Workplace