SMARTx HEALTH

Description

Stress in humans results from interactions between persons and their environment that are perceived as straining orexceeding their adaptive capacities and threatening their well-being. The element of perception indicates that humanstress responses reflect differences in personality, as well as differences in physical strength or general health.

Risk factors for stress-related illnesses are a mix of personal, interpersonal, and social variables. These factors includelack or loss of control over one's physical environment, and lack or loss of social support networks. People who are dependent on others (e.g., children or the elderly) or who are socially disadvantaged (because of race, gender, educational level, or similar factors) are at greater risk of developing stress-related illnesses. Other risk factors include feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, extreme fear or anger, and cynicism or distrust of others.

 

Causes and symptoms

The causes of stress can include any event or occurrence that a person considers a threat to his or her coping strategiesor resources. Researchers generally agree that a certain degree of stress is a normal part of a living organism's responseto the inevitable changes in its physical or social environment, and that positive, as well as negative, events can generate stress as well as negative occurrences. Stress-related disease, however, results from excessive and prolonged demands on an organism's coping resources. It is now believed that 80-90% of all disease is stress-related.

Recent research indicates that some vulnerability to stress is genetic. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin and King'sCollege London discovered that people who inherited a short, or stress-sensitive, version of the serotonin transporter gene were almost three times as likely to experience depression following a stressful event as people with the long version of the gene. Further research is likely to identify other genes that affect susceptibility to stress.

One cause of stress that has affected large sectors of the general population around the world since 2001 is terrorism.    

 

The events of September 11, 2001, the sniper shootings in Virginia and Maryland and the Bali nightclub bombing in 2002,the suicide bombings in the Middle East in 2003, have all been shown to cause short-term symptoms of stress in peoplewho read about them or watch television news reports as well as those who witnessed the actual events. Stress related toterrorist attacks also appears to affect people in countries far from the location of the attack as well as those in theimmediate vicinity. It is too soon to tell how stress related to episodes of terrorism will affect human health over longperiods of time, but researchers are already beginning to investigate this question. In 2004 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on the after effects of the World Trade Center attacks on rescue and recovery workers and volunteers. The researchers found that over half the 11,700 people who were interviewed met threshold criteria for a mental health evaluation. A longer-term evaluation of these workers is underway.

A new condition that has been identified since 9/11 is childhood traumatic grief, or CTG. CTG refers to an intense stress reaction that may develop in children following the loss of a parent, sibling, or other loved one during a traumatic event.

 

 

As defined by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), "Children with childhood traumatic grief experience the cause of [the loved one's] death as horrifying or terrifying, whether the death was sudden and unexpected (for example, due to homicide, suicide, motor vehicle accident, drug overdose, natural disaster, war, terrorism, and so on) or due to natural causes (cancer, heart attack, and so forth). Even if the manner of death does not appear to others to be sudden, shocking, or frightening, children who perceive the death in this way may develop childhood traumatic grief. In this condition, even happy thoughts and memories of the deceased person remind children of the traumatic way in which the deceased died."