Stress and Inflammation

In Functional Medicine we view stress as a toxic influence on the body's physiology. A recent study confirms this using 1,000 patients with cardiovascular disease. The researchers were from the San Francisco VA Medical Center and from the University of California, San Francisco. The researchers evaluated the patients for cumulative traumatic stress over the course of a lifetime. The greater the stress levels, the high the levels of inflammatory markers. This held true even in people without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Five years later they remeasured the patients still living. They found that the patients who had originally reported the highest level of trauma at the beginning of the study still had the highest levels of inflammation. These patients were all older. Knowing this, it seems that helping younger people with stress management techniques, yoga, meditation, may dampen the increase in inflammation early on. High levels of inflammatory markers have been associated not only with heart disease, but also with depression and cancer. This study was published in the the February issue of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.