Jaideep Bains, PhD, an Alberta Innovates Health Solutions funded associate professor in the faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta on
Photograph by: Leah Hennel, Calgary Herald
CALGARY - Stress - believe it or not - is actually a good thing, in limited, isolated doses.
When your house is on fire, stress is the instinctual, survivor-response that gets you and your family out before anyone is hurt.
But if other, perceived stresses - crying babies, rush-hour traffic, ringing cellphones, and annoying bosses - become commonplace, the brain becomes permanently wired to overreact to each event.
Stress then becomes chronic, and a myriad of health problems can result, from heart conditions to depression and other psychological disorders.
A University of Calgary researcher is on his way to treating chronic stress after identifying the protein that switches on the brain's stress command centre and the mechanism that primes the cells to be on "standby" for any new, upcoming stresses.
Jaideep Bains, PhD, an associate professor in the Hotchkiss Brain Institute will have his findings published in the October issue of the prestigious international journal Nature Neuroscience.
"If you are consistently exposed to stress at work or in your personal life, your brain stays stuck in hyper-vigilant mode," says Bains.
"Understanding stress at the level of the brain cells is vital, because stress is a complex chain reaction."
By identifying those stress mechanisms, Bains believes the next step can be finding a medication to control and reduce chronic stress and our brain's overreaction, without erasing the body's survivor response.
"It is essential that our brain is able to respond quickly to stress, release hormones, and activate the fight-or-flight response - this is a fundamental survival mechanism," says Bains.
"In today's world of conflicting priorities, we may need to protect the brain against overreacting to chronic stress."
Chronic stress has been linked to a number of health conditions including heart disease, depression, memory impairment, even the death of brain cells.
In a 2003 Watson Wyatt study, 180 organizations with more than 500,000 full-time Canadian employees were surveyed and found that psychological disorders (including depression, anxiety and stress) are the main cause of 79 per cent of short-term disability claims and 73 per cent of long-term disability claims.
source: The Calgary Herald
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