Effects Of Psychological Stress Research Articles

Statistical analysis of psychological and physiological stress in public transport drivers

Public transport drivers face various factors that put their health at risk, not only in traffic matters, such as psychological stress, physiological stress, and working conditions. This paper aims to study said variables in public transport (bus) drivers in southern Tamaulipas, through a statistical study that can show the risk conditions for the study participants. To achieve this, a quantitative and descriptive research was carried out, with a convenient voluntary sampling of 77 surveys. Firstly, an exploratory factorial study was conducted on variables mentioned above, where the most reliable items were identified. Subsequently, a mediation analysis was carried through, resulting in the finding that the effect of psychological stress on physiological stress is less when mediated by

The Cytokine, Chemokine, and Growth Factor Network of Prenatal Depression.

Neuro-immune pathways are engaged in antenatal and postpartum depression. To determine if immune profiles influence the severity of prenatal depression above and beyond the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and current psychological stressors. Using the Bio-Plex Pro human cytokine 27-plex test kit, we assayed M1 macrophage, T helper (Th)-1, Th-2, Th-17, growth factor, chemokine, and T cell growth immune profiles as well as indicators of the immune inflammatory response system (IRS) and compensatory immunoregulatory system (CIRS) in 120 pregnant females in the early (<16 weeks) and late (>24 weeks) pregnancy. The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) was used to assess severity of antenatal depression. Cluster analyses showed that the combined effects of ACE, relationship dissatisfaction, unwanted pregnancy, PMS, and upregulated M1, Th-1, Th-2, and IRS immune profiles and the ensuing early depressive symptoms shape a stress-immune-depression phenotypic class. Elevated IL-4, IL-6, IL-8, IL-12p70, IL-15, IL-17, and GM-CSF are the cytokines associated with this phenotypic class. All immune profiles (except CIRS) were significantly associated with the early EPDS score, independent of the effects of psychological variables and PMS. There was a shift in immune profiles from early to late pregnancy, with an increase in the IRS/CIRS ratio. The late EPDS score was predicted by the early EPDS score, adverse experiences, and immune profiles, mainly the Th-2 and Th-17 phenotypes. Activated immune phenotypes contribute to early and late perinatal depressive symptoms above and beyond the effects of psychological stressors and PMS.

Тревога, депрессия и нарушения сна у пациентов, перенесших COVID-19

At the beginning of 2020, a novel coronavirus designated as SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China and caused an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Pandemic has threatened global mental health via disruptive societal changes and neuropsychiatric sequelae including depression, anxiety and sleep disorders after SARS-CoV-2 infection. Virus is able to access CNS through blood circulation or neural pathway. Brain damage can be also due to hypoxia, hypercoagulation and endothelial dysfunction. The effects of psychological stressors and drug therapy may be also relevant for development of neuropsychiatric disorders after COVID-19. Women and patients with a history of mental disorders are more susceptible to neuropsychiatric disorders and frequently present with more severe complications. Affective, anxiety or psychotic disorders can persist for 6 months after recovery from COVID-19. These data highlight the need in drug therapy to treat depression and anxiety, to normalize sleep and to prevent the development of serious neuropsychiatric sequelae of infection.

Genome-Wide mRNA Expression Analysis of Acute Psychological Stress Responses.

Most previous studies have examined the effects of acute psychological stress in humans based on select gene panels. The genomic approach may help identify novel genes that underline biological mechanisms of acute psychological stress responses. This exploratory study aimed to investigate genome-wide transcriptional activity changes in response to acute psychological stress. The sample included 40 healthy women (mean age 31.4 ± 11.6 years). Twenty-two participants had a stress experience induced by the Trier Social Stress Test (experimental group) and 18 did not (control group). Psychological stress levels and hemodynamic changes were assessed before and after the Trier Social Stress Test. Peripheral blood samples obtained before and after the Trier Social Stress Test were processed for mRNA sequencing. Psychological and hemodynamic stress parameters indicated that the Trier Social Stress Test induced moderate levels of stress in the experimental group. Six genes (HCG26, HCP5, HLA-F, HLA-F-AS1, LOC1019287, and SLC22A16) were up-regulated, and fi ve genes (CA1, FBXO9, SNCA, STRADB, and TRMT12) were down-regulated among those who experienced stress induction, compared with the control group. Nine genes of eleven were linked to endocrine system disorders, neurological disease, and organismal injury and abnormalities. Of the genes identifi ed in this study, HCP5, SLC22A16, and SNCA genes have previously been proposed as therapeutic targets for cancer and Parkinson disease. Further studies are needed to examine pathological mechanisms through which these genes mediate eff ects of psychological stress on adverse health outcomes. Such studies may ultimately identify therapeutic targets that enhance biological resilience to adverse eff ects of psychological stress.

Mental Health Problems Among School-Aged Children After School Reopening: A Cross-Sectional Study During the COVID-19 Post-pandemic in East China.

Background: Most studies on mental health problems caused by COVID-19 crisis in children were limited to the period of home quarantine. It remained unclear what adverse impact of the psychosocial stressors caused by school reopening, as well as the transitions in daily activities and social interactions had on mental health in children.Methods: A total of 6400 students in primary schools were enrolled in a cross-sectional study conducted in East China, between June 26 and July 6, 2020, when schools reopened. Children’s mental health status was assessed by the parent version of Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Ultimately, data on a total of 6017 children with completed information on mental health, psychosocial stressors, daily activities, and social interactions were eligible for analysis. The associations of mental health with psychosocial stressors, daily activities, and social interactions were determined by ordinal logistic regression models. Stratified analyses were conducted according to grade, gender, school level, area, and caregiver–child relationship to further observe the effects of stressors on mental status.Results: The prevalence of borderline, moderately abnormal, and prominently abnormal scores were 7.16, 3.34, and 1.96% for total difficulties, and 13.83, 13.45, and 17.85% for prosocial behavior, respectively. Children with psychological stressors had a significantly higher risk of being in a worse category of mental health status, with the maximum adjusted OR of 7.90 (95% CI 3.33–18.75) in those definitely afraid of inadaptation to study and life styles. Time used in home work and computer games was positively related to mental health problems, while physical exercises and frequency of communication with others was negatively related. The effects of psychological stressors on total difficulties were more evident in middle-high grade students (OR = 7.52, 95% CI 4.16–8.61), boys (OR = 6.95, 95% CI 4.83–8.55), those who lived in Taizhou (OR = 7.62, 95% CI 4.72–8.61) and with poor caregiver–child relationship (OR = 7.79, 95% CI 2.26–8.65).Conclusion: Emotional and behavioral difficulties, especially less prosocial behavior, were prevalent in primary school children after schools reopened. The Chinese government, communities, schools, and families need to provide more effective support for students’ transition back into the school building and address emotional and behavioral problems for children with difficulties.

Does well-being associate with stress physiology? A systematic review and meta-analysis.

The current meta-analysis tested whether trait indicators of well-being associate with stressor-evoked physiological reactivity and recovery in healthy adults. Medline, PsycINFO, and PubMed were used to identify relevant articles. Articles were included if they (a) measured cardiovascular or neuroendocrine (but not immune) physiology during or after an acute laboratory stress paradigm (b) measured indicators of hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being, or optimism, and (c) included healthy adult participants. Laboratory stress tasks included frustrating cognitive tasks, emotional recall tasks, and tasks involving social evaluation. Physiological variables were aggregated across cardiac (heart rate and cardiac output), hemodynamic (mean arterial pressure, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure), HPA (cortisol), and autonomic (high frequency heart rate variability, skin conductance, and catecholamines) markers. Twenty-seven studies were included (n = 3,390; 54.6% women). Effect sizes and confidence intervals were estimated using a random-effects model with pooled variance. Contrary to expectations, optimism was associated with greater cardiac reactivity to cognitive stressors but did not associate with stress recovery. By contrast, hedonic well-being was associated with enhanced hemodynamic recovery following laboratory stressors but was not associated with stress reactivity. Hedonic well-being, but not optimism, could potentially buffer against the effects of psychological stressors on physiological responding by relating to more complete recovery. Identifying the mechanisms contributing to these patterns of association may provide insights into psychological interventions for well-being and stress-related disease risk. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological stressors as interventions: Good out of the evil

Stress in general can be defined as a state of threatened balance, equilibrium or harmony that tends to disturb the homeostasis of the body. Stress can be of many kinds viz. psychological, physiological, social, emotional, and nutritional. Albeit the distinct kinds of stress stated in the aforementioned stress list, it is hard to bring out a clear distinction between them since each stress may precede or succeed the manifestation of any other. The studies discussed in the review elucidate effects of psychological stressors (PS) on diseases such as cancer, AIDS, epidermal abnormalities, obesity, and various inflammatory diseases like colonic inflammations, Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), Coronary Heart Disease (CHD), asthma. From these studies, further attempt was made to establish the basic mechanisms which come into play during a stressor stimulus and consequently modulate the physiology of the body. In this review we have highlighted effects of PS on diseases while simultaneously building on the modes of operation of PS to alter physiology and its further implications in developing potential psychotherapeutic methods for disease treatment.

Modern approaches to understanding stress and disease susceptibility: A review with special emphasis on respiratory disease

Studies in animals and humans link both physical and psychological stress with an increased incidence and severity of respiratory infections. For this manuscript we define stress as the physiological responses an individual undergoes while adjusting to a continually changing environment. It is known that stressors of various types (psychological/physical) can alter the physiological levels of certain hormones, chemokines and cytokines. These alterations send information to the central nervous system to take necessary action which then sends messages to appropriate organs/tissues/cells to respond. These messages can either activate or suppress the immune system as needed and failure to compensate for this by the body can lead to serious health-related problems. Little is known how stress affects disease susceptibility, yet understanding this mechanism is important for developing effective treatments, and for improving health and food quality. The current review focuses on (a) the effects of psychological stressors in humans and animals, (b) various methodologies employed to understand stress responses and their outcomes, and (c) the current status of the attempts to correlate stress and disease with respiratory disease as model system. The methodologies included in this review span traditional epidemiological, behavioral and immunological studies to current high throughput genomic, proteomic, metabolomic/metabonomic approaches. With the advent of various newer omics and bioinformatics methodologies we postulate that it will become feasible to understand the mechanisms through which stress can influence disease onset. Although the literature in this area is limited because of the infancy of this research area, the objective of this review is to illustrate the power of new approaches to address complex biological questions. These new approaches will also aid in our understanding how these processes are related to the dynamics and kinetics of changes in expression of multiple genes at various levels.

The Effects of Psychological Stressors on the Intestinal Microbiota

The stress response affects virtually every organ in the body and constitutes a coordinated behavioral and physiological response to potentially threatening stimuli that may be physiological or psychological in nature. There is a substantial amount of research focusing on how the stress response affects health, but relatively few studies have focused on the ability of the stress response to affect indigenous populations of bacteria in the intestines, referred to as the intestinal microbiota. Research from our lab, and from others, have demonstrated that psychological stressors early in the life span significantly changes the levels of different types of microbiota that are shed from the intestines in the stool. In our studies, stress in young rhesus monkeys, and even in the prenatal period, led to a significant reduction in the levels of lactobacilli and bifidobacteria shed in the stool. In rodents, prolonged restraint stress resulted in a significant overgrowth of aerobic microbiota, particularly Gram-negative aerobes, in the intestines. Interestingly, there is increasing evidence that alterations in the microbiota are associated with a variety of diseases that are known to be exacerbated during periods of psychological stress, including irritable bowel syndrome and the inflammatory bowel diseases. Thus, our data provide a compelling rationale to test the hypothesis that stress-induced exacerbations of intestinal diseases are in part due to stress-induced alterations of the microbiota.

Cardiovascular reactivity to psychological stressors

This paper reports two experiments investigating the effect of psychological stressors on performance and cardiovascular function. In the first study, two groups of 24 participants performed a cognitive task and a reaction-time task under different levels of stress created through ego-involvement while heart rate was monitored continuously. In the second study, cardiovascular function was monitored while 20 participants performed a reaction-time task under instructions designed to induce competitive stress. In both studies, differences in reported stress level were found to be associated with significant changes in performance and cardiovascular function with slower cardiovascular recovery following the more stressful condition in the second study. The results are discussed in terms of the use of cardiovascular measures as indices of subjective stress and cognitive load.

Heterogeneity in neuroendocrine and immune responses to brief psychological stressors as a function of autonomic cardiac activation.

Human responses to brief psychological stressors are characterized by changes and large individual differences in autonomic, neuroendocrine, and immune function. The authors examined the effects of brief psychological stressors on cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and cellular immune response in 22 older women to investigate the common effects of stress across systems. They also used interindividual variation in heart rate reactivity, cardiac sympathetic reactivity (as indexed by preejection period reactivity in their reactivity paradigm), and cardiac vagal reactivity (as indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity) to explore the heterogeneity in human responses to brief psychological stressors. The results revealed that brief psychological stressors heightened cardiac activation, elevated plasma catecholamine concentrations, and affected the cellular immune response. It was also found that individuals characterized by high, relative to low, cardiac sympathetic reactivity showed higher stress-related changes in adrenocorticotropic hormone and cortisol plasma levels but comparable changes in epinephrine and norepinephrine concentrations. These data suggest that the effects of psychological stressors on cardiovascular and cellular immune response are governed by coordinated regulatory mechanism(s) and that going beyond the simple notion of heart rate reactivity to examine neural substrates may shed light on the interrelationships among and the regulatory mechanisms for the autonomic, endocrine, and immune responses to stressors.

Prenatal ethanol exposure alters adrenocortical response to predictable and unpredictable stressors

In the present study, effects of psychological stressors and stressor predictability on the adrenocortical responses of animals exposed to ethanol in utero were examined. Male and female offspring from ethanol-exposed (E), pair-fed (PF), and ad lib-fed control (C) conditions were tested in adulthood. Separate sets of animals were exposed once daily for 5 consecutive days to either unpredictable (UNPRED) or predictable (PRED) restraint stress or to UNPRED novelty stress. On the fifth test day, blood samples for plasma corticosterone determination were taken either prior to stress (basal levels) or following stress. Males in all groups and C females had higher basal corticosterone levels if previously subjected to PRED restraint than if previously subjected to UNPRED restraint; E and PF females did not exhibit this differential responsiveness. Following restraint stress on the fifth test day, there were no significant differences in response to PRED and UNPRED restraint among E, PF, and C males. In contrast, C but not E or PF females exhibited a greater plasma corticosterone response to UNPRED than to PRED restraint. Following novelty stress, E males exhibited a significantly reduced plasma corticosterone response compared to PF and C males. For females, there was a trend for an increased corticoid response in E compared to PF females following novelty stress as well as a different pattern of response among groups from days 1 to 5 of testing. These data support and extend previous studies suggesting that, compared to PF and C animals, E animals may exhibit altered responses to stressors as well as deficits in the ability to use or respond to environmental cues.

Generalized resistance to the effects of psychological stressors.

Generalized resistance to the effects of psychological stressors.