Latest Stress Stories
A University of British Columbia and Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) study has revealed that childhood poverty, stress as an adult, and demographics such as age, sex and ethnicity, all leave an imprint on a person’s genes. And, that this imprint could play a role in our immune response. The study was published last week in a special volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at how experiences beginning before birth and in the years...
Scientists at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, and Kings College, London, have found that mothers who stroke their baby's body in the first few weeks after birth may change the effects that stress during pregnancy can have on an infant's early-life development. Researchers world-wide have been studying whether stress in pregnancy can lead to emotional and behavioral problems in children for many years. Attention is now moving towards how parents might alter these effects after...
A brain pathway that is stimulated by traumatic or fearful experiences can be disrupted by two compounds that show promise for preventing post-traumatic stress disorder, Indiana University researchers reported. In a presentation prepared for the Neuroscience 2012 scientific conference in New Orleans Oct. 13 to 17, Anantha Shekhar and colleagues from IU reported the results of experiments with rats using a standard methodology called a conditioned fear test. The neural signaling...
Companionship has the potential to reduce pain linked to nerve damage, according to a new study. Mice that were paired with a cage-mate showed lower pain responses and fewer signs of inflammation in their nervous system after undergoing surgery that affected their nerves than did isolated mice, suggesting that the social contact had both behavioral and physiological influences. The social contact lowered the pain response and signs of inflammation even in animals that had experienced...
A new study in animals shows that chronic stress during pregnancy prevents brain benefits of motherhood, a finding that researchers suggest could increase understanding of postpartum depression. Rat mothers showed an increase in brain cell connections in regions associated with learning, memory and mood. In contrast, the brains of mother rats that were stressed twice a day throughout pregnancy did not show this increase. The researchers were specifically interested in dendritic spines...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online There are noises that set our teeth on edge, make us recoil, and generally unnerve us. For me, that noise is the sound of someone popping his or her back. Scientists from Newcastle University and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging say heightened activity between the emotional and auditory areas of the brain can explain why the sound of chalk on a blackboard, a knife on a bottle, or a joint popping is so unpleasant. A new...
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Oct. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As a Marriage and family Therapist for over 35 years, I have worked to help families find healthier and more productive ways to deal with stressful times. To that end I have studied the growing body of science on effective relationships and organizational systems, and as I view societal dynamics I find myself wondering why politics has become so dysfunctional. I believe we can do better. In these trying times of...
NEW YORK, Oct. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- To cope with stress, too many Americans have turned to sleeping pills, drugs, booze and food - and it seems we are more stressed out than ever. Perhaps we can blame it on the Great Recession, global events, technology, family, a boss, or just the fast-paced, ever-changing ever-competitive mobile lifestyle on the run, 24-7. It doesn't have to be this way. There is hope and it comes from an unlikely source - a man who once suffered a nervous...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The female and male genders share several broad, general similarities. We’re all human, after all, capable of good and evil and experiencing the full gamut of emotions. It’s when these generalities are dissected that the differences come to light. For example, researchers at the University of Montreal’s Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital conducted a survey of both genders and discovered, on...
By the time our children reach kindergarten their learning and developmental patterns are already taking shape, as is a trajectory for their future health. Now, for the first time, scientists have amassed a large collection of research that looks "under the skin", to examine how and why experiences interact with biology starting before birth to affect a life course. Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners, a special volume published in the...
