Is Stress Giving You Alzheimer's?
Monday, 15 Sep 2014 09:44 AM
By Nick Tate
Progress toward a cure for Alzheimer’s disease has been maddeningly slow, with only minor successes reported in developing effective treatments in the past decade. But new research suggests one simple strategy can greatly reduce the risk of developing the memory-robbing brain disease: Managing your stress.
In studies presented at the recent Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Copenhagen, dementia specialists with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine reported that people who people who face a lot of chronic stress in their everyday lives are more likely to develop dementia. Those findings echo recent research findings by Gothenburg University in Sweden that high stress in midlife may triggerphysiological and biochemical changes in the brain that increase the risk of Alzheimer’s in old age.
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Richard Lipton, M.D., head of the Division of Cognitive Aging and Dementia at Einstein’s Montefiore Headache Center in New York, tells Newsmax Health that chronic stress and anxiety increase the production of the hormone cortisol, which can wreak havoc on brain function and increase the risks for a host of mental and physical health problems.
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“If people get agitated and ruminate [on stressful events] that makes a stress hormone called cortisol go up and it also activates the autonomic nervous system,” says Dr. Lipton, in an interview on Newsmax TV’s Meet the Doctors program. “Our work shows that people who have high levels of perceived stress develop dementing disorders at increased rates relative to those who have lower levels of stress.”
Similar conclusions were reached by Gothenburg University scientists who recently reported in the British Medical Journal BMJ Open that people who deal with a lot of daily stresses in midlife are more likely to develop dementia in old age, with the link particularly strong among women.
For the study, investigators tracked 800 Swedish women for 40 years, beginning in 1968. The women underwent psychiatric tests and exams and were surveyed about 18 common stressors, such as divorce, widowhood, serious illness or death of a child, alcoholism in the family, and poor social support.
The results showed a high number of stressors was associated with a 21 percent greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s and a 15 percent greater risk of other forms of dementia. It was also tied to a variety of physiological reactions in the central nervous, endocrine, immune, and cardiovascular systems.
“Our study shows that common psychosocial stressors may have severe and long-standing physiological and psychological consequences,” researchers wrote. “More studies are needed to confirm these results and investigate whether more interventions such as stress management and behavioral therapy should be initiated in individuals who have experienced psychosocial stressors.”
Dr. Lipton notes that stress is a part of everyday life, but certain types of stress are more serious than others.
“People will often say, well, life is stressful, what can you do about stress? But we measure stress at three levels,” he says. “There’s first of all the circumstances you find yourself in; the traffic jam I was caught in on the way to the studio today that made me late, for example. But then there’s the perception of the stressful event, and if people get agitated and ruminate that makes a stress hormone called cortisol go up and it also activates the autonomic nervous system” which can raise health risks.”
Mary Karapetian Alvord, a practicing Washington, D.C., psychologist and stress specialist, tells Newsmax Health the growing understanding of the connections between stress, Alzheimer’s, and illness drive greater efforts to manage stress.
"For me the bottom line is how can you improve your response to stress?" says Alvord, a member of the American Psychological Association and adjunct associate professor at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. She recommends the following strategies to manage stress:
Relaxation techniques: Do something — meditation, yoga, and other practices — that calms your mind when stressed. It can also help to identify solutions to stressful situations.
Get moving: Exercise boosts production of the brain's feel-good neurotransmitters, endorphins, which improve mood and lower stress levels, as well as the risk of depression.
Watch what you eat: Look for links between what you eat, and when, and stress. If you’re eating when you're stressed and not hungry, find a distraction. Keep comfort foods out of your home or workplace.
Socialize: In addition to trying stress-management techniques, build strong support networks, using “positive self-talk” to boost esteem and ease stress.
In addition to the latest research on stress, the Alzheimer’s Association conference featured new studies on the links between dementia and the abnormal accumulation of two types of proteins in the brain — tau and amyloid plaques, Dr. Lipton notes.
“For several years now we've been able to use PET [brain] scans to identify amyloid in the brains of older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and that helps predict risk,” he says. “But … one of the big pieces of news at this meeting was that it’s now possible to take pictures of the brain protein tau — again using PET scanning in living people — and the hope is that will help us do a much much better job of identifying people at high risk for interventions.”
He adds that there has been progress in developing new drugs, if not a cure, for Alzheimer’s, in recent decades. Four primary drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration — Aricept, Exelon, Razadyne, and Namenda — that alter brain chemistry to combat dementia.
“When I first started studying the disorder there were really no treatments at all … Now there are a number of FDA-approved treatments for Alzheimer’s disease,” he notes.
Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, the sixth leading cause of death in the nation. An estimated 5 million Americans aged 65 and over are living with Alzheimer’s, most of whom are women. This number is expected to almost triple to 16 million by 2050.
“The reason the disorder is so devastating is that it attacks the very core of what makes us human,” notes Dr. Lipton. “What could be worse than losing your memory, losing your past, fearing losing the ability to take care of yourself? So it is a very frightening illness.”
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Poster Comment:
Latest info is that Alzheimer's is caused by a bacteria. ;)