Stress Affecting Growth

I have a lot to say personally about Chapter 6, about the importance of stress on growth factors. I completely agree with all the research that has been found on this topic. When children are young,they need the optimal care they can get and not just material objects, they need love, comfort, care, touching, interaction, something to grasp onto. I have learned about the Harry Harlow monkey experiments in countless psychology classes. The theme of his research seems to be over arching in childhood development. It is related to that of a rat or a monkey because when put under stressful situations like only having a wire mother who feels tough and cold to hang onto and feed from makes the monkeys scared and not want to be placed in social situation so this inhibits their development. I feel that every stressor that life presents you can make the growth system in the body slow down. This holds true later in life as well, especially around the times of puberty. For example, young girls who have societal pressures to be thin at such a young age due to what they are seeing in the media, the perfect image. They try to replicate this image by becoming bulimic or anorexic at a really young age, like in their pre teens and then they are late to get their periods or don't get them for a couple years. This can cause detrimental effects on growth because girls need that estrogen to grow and develop. 

 

Additionally, a divorce between the parents of a family can cause great stress on the children whether they are at a young age or in their teenage years. It is like a bond is being broken in the family and everything is splitting up. The world they once knew is totally and completely different, never to be reversed again. Dealing with this kind of pain takes a long time and even if the children might not outwardly show it, there are signs of their emotional detriments in their everyday activities at school and with their friends. They will always seem down or they might put on a completely different image or mask to make it seem like it has not been affecting them. Even if they find an outlet of release for their pain, the stress will always follow with them because family is such a huge part of a child's life. When this kind of event happens during puberty it can have altering affects on the child's growth patterns and everything.  There are a million and one things that can cause stress to a child during the development period its just a matter of when the stressful event occurs and how it is dealt with. 

Stress

"A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominately, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages,relationships, and promotions."(p.6) In the book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Robert M. Sapolsky makes a great comparison between animals and humans and how stress affects our bodies. Looking from a zebras perspective, the things which stress us out on a daily basis are ridiculous. Meanwhile they stress out over survival, we don't think of major disasters or death on a daily basis so we look into smaller irrelevant things to worry about. For example mortgages, relationships and promotions, not even one of those relates to our health or our survival chance yet they are among the top things which we stress over about. I have read once that the more you stress out about certain situation or even the less likely it is going to happen, and from experience I believe it to be true. For example asking a person on a date and stressing out all the different possibilities of them rejecting you or something going wrong, but in the end everything works out great, or messing up at work and stressing about getting fired meanwhile your boss might not even notice, or doesn't see it as a horrible situation.

Students and Stress

As college students, we tend to feel pretty stressed on a regular basis.  With getting that paper done on time, going to work, internships, relationships (or lack of any of these things), our lives are hectic and stressed.  Add to this situation the fact that we are going to school in New York City, a place where people are always on the move, rushing around and stressed.  Sapolsky even states that exposure to New York City is a risk factor for a fatal heart attack due to the high levels of “stress, excitement, fear, and disruption of sleep/wake cycles than in most other places” (49).  Reading this book is even making me stressed, thinking about all the ways that I am slowly shortening my life.  At the same time, I learning ways to improve it, so it evens out.  What I found particularly interesting was the section on stress and eating.  I was comforted by the fact that I am with the majority and tend to eat more while stressed.  I now realize this is due to the levels of glucocorticoids which cause the cravings for the delicious starchy, sugary foods.   However as Sapolsky concludes, our responses to stress vary by individual.  This is true for the effects it may have on appetite, but also other factors such as risk for heart attack and strokes.  Even though stress varies from each individual, we can agree that it is not good, and can have long term consequences.  As a result, I think it is important to try to eliminate certain situations that may cause us stress.  While we cannot simply get away with doing that final research paper claiming it is bad for us and will cause us to have a heart attack one day, we can take steps to dealing with the stress.  Sapolsky discusses these methods, such as exercise and meditation, in his final chapter.  Overall, I find this book very interesting and look forward to sharing this information with family and friends. 

The Inheritance of Child Abuse

This morning I happened across an an interesting article in the Bloomberg News that seemed quite relevant to class. A Harvard University study suggests that childhood abuse can lead to physiological disruptions in the hippocampus, which causes adult depression and drug abuse down the road. Young men who had histories of child abuse demonstrated differences in parts of the brain where new neurons are generated, and have less dense (up to 6.5%) hippocampus tissue, which processes emotions, fear, memory etc. Dampening activity in this part of the brain has been linked to depression and schizophrenia. In addition people who have endured this type abuse are more biologically sensitive to stress, and such factors may shorten their life expectancy by as much as 20 years, other studies indicate. On a more cheery note, it is also noted that certain drugs and lifestyle changes can prompt the formation of new neurons!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/02/13/bloomberg_articlesLZCANO1A74E901-LZCJQ.DTL

I think this was interesting in context of our conversation of genetics vs inheritance. One would assume that changes in the composition of our brain and psychiatric condition is overwhelmingly genetic. The physiological manifestation of a social phenomena (such as child abuse) is a fascinating contradiction to this genetic excuse, and instead indicates that many 'inheritable' traits, such depression may have roots in behavior. Perhaps parents who mentally and physically abuse their children have higher chances of being substance abusers or depressed, resultant from a long chain of child abuse in their family. The inheritance of child abuse! This parallels our discussion of social conditions vs genetics in the inheritance of low birth weight risk. The article briefly delves into the financial burden of child abuse on society and healthcare, which I also found interesting.

Reduction of Anixety Through Meditation

Anxiety is a psychiatric disorder that Sapolsky describes as being “rooted in cognitive distortion” (319). An anxiety-prone person’s thoughts create a psychological state of dread and apprehension, which in turn affects how they feel and act. As a result of the excessive worry, people diagnosed with anxiety disorders have abnormal, chronically overactive stress responses, which leads to an increased risk of many diseases. A widely used method of dealing with anxiety disorders is through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy is an approach that attempts to systematically recognize and eliminate dysfunctional thoughts, which will change how we feel and our behaviors. While this method has been proven to be effective, there has been a rise in the usage of alternative treatments, a major one being mindfulness mediation.

Sapolsky mentions the use of meditation as a technique for managing stress. Meditation is used to increase our ability to relax, which in turn should increase our ability to cope with stress more effectively. While there are many different forms of meditation, the form that the majority of the scientific studies have focused on is mindfulness meditation. The goal of mindfulness meditation is to make create stability and peace in our minds while increasing awareness. Researchers have been studying the effectiveness mindfulness mediation based treatments in reducing anxiety. Through randomized trials, it has been shown that mindfulness meditation therapy can significantly reduce anxiety, as well as successfully improve mood, functionality, and quality of life.

A study published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, used images from the brain throughout an eight week long mindfulness mediation based stress reduction group to show that actual structural changes occur to our brain when we meditate. Reductions in stress were found to be associated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which, as Sapolsky explained, plays a very important role in anxiety disorders. These studies show that mindfulness meditation should be increasingly used as a therapeutic technique to reduce anxiety. Meditation could possibly be used as a prevention method before a person is inflicted with a stress related disorder. It would be interesting to possibly study other forms of meditation in order to see if their effectiveness in anxiety reduction differs. Another interesting possible study would be to track the long term effects of meditation and health outcomes in order to discover if any other ailments can be treated or prevented with such a method.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110121144007.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/cp4/client_edit/topic4/sg3b-1.pdf

Marathons and Health

In a study spearheaded by Dr. Stanley Nattel of the Montreal Heart Institute Research Center, “Canadian and Spanish scientists prodded young, healthy rats to run at an intense pace, day after day, for three months, which is the equivalent of about 10 years in human terms. The training was deliberately designed to mimic many years of serious marathon training in people.” By the end of the study, these formerly healthy rats exhibited scarring and structural changes in their hearts and were more prone to irregular heartbeats, not unlike in humans. “Interestingly, when the animals stopped running, their hearts returned to normal within eight weeks. Most of the fibrosis and other apparent damage disappeared.”

This study, designed to assess the toll that sustained, intense training takes on a person’s physiology, highlighted exactly what some may find the definition of insane. As Sapolsky on page 123, “sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, “Are you crazy? That’s stressful.”” He also addresses the negative correlation between long distance running and fertility (because of low testosterone and estrogen production) and bone health.

I found this topic worth looking into because, in general, we try to get people to exercise more (if at all) to reap its many physical and psychological benefits, but once in awhile a story breaks of a death during a marathon or debilitating injury from improper training and it’s interesting to see there are some people who find pounding the pavement for 26.2 (or longer!) an enjoyable pastime. More may not always be better, but for whomever wants to wake up early for long training runs dedicate their free time...more power to them!

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/when-exercise-is-too-much-of-a-good-thing/?scp=5&sq=marathons%20and%20health&st=cse#

Deeper Issues of Low Birth Weight

One of the more thought-provoking points raised by The Starting Gate is the link between low birth weight and race.  When examining the high occurrence of African-Americans giving birth to lower weight babies than other races, one may be led to believe that there is a genetic causation involved.  Conley et al, however, suggest that the societal factors associated with some African-Americans, such as lower income and socioeconomic status, are more to blame than genes.  Furthering this point, when social scientists examined the birth weights of infants born in West Africa, they charted a more normal trend of birth weights than African-American babies.  

With this staggering information, along with the harrowing details of potential health risks for low weight babies, the question of how we can fix this inevitably arises.  While Conley points out policy reforms, such as Medicaid, which can help treat and aid babies with low birth weight, perhaps a more significant reform is mandated in order to mend the issue at its root.  The deeper issue is that there is an inequality and wealth gap that is so substantial that it actually impacts a person’s biology.  Not only is the affected person living in poverty with low social status, but a monumental problem is also that his or her child will almost certainly be stuck in the same predicament and highly unlikely to advance.  If the child is born with health issues, accompanied with the risk for illness later, then a large portion of the family’s income will be allocated towards medical funds. With the perpetual shortage of money, it becomes almost impossible to transcend to a higher class.  Thus, the cycle of low birth rate will probably perpetuate amongst a lineage. How to fix inequality in society has always been a heavily debated topic with no definitive answer.  While it is easier said than done, more focus nevertheless should be placed on conceptualizing how to minimize the inequality gap, and thereby minimizing the trend of low birth weights.