Depression Worsens Stress- Brings More Harm to Our Health

Even a little stress, almost imperceptible for a healthy person, causes a long-lasting and robust reaction in a patient with depression.

In response to stress, the body mobilizes all resources: the level of stress hormones increases, breathing and heartbeat increase, the level of glucose in the blood increases, from which all organs receive energy. Mobilization also applies to the immune system: the level of regulatory proteins of cytokines, which stimulate inflammation, rises- the immune system is preparing for the appearance of potentially dangerous foreign substances.

The stress appears mostly as a normal reaction, "physiological" of the body. If he persists, he is responsible for all those unpleasant symptoms that often lead to the stress of seeing a doctor. Stress is not considered as an illness, but if it is not managed or controlled, it can promote the occurrence of sometimes serious diseases. The scientific community, therefore, defines stress as a risk factor for the appearance of certain diseases.

Cardiovascular complications

They are due to the presence of atheroma deposits on the small arteries irrigating the heart, the coronaries. Narrowing, or stenosis, of one or more of these arteries, can lead to myocardial infarction with a life-threatening risk.

In the 1950s, American cardiologists found that many of their coronary patients shared the same type of behavior. In 1959 they describe profiles A and B.

TYPE A: he conceives life as a struggle. He is impatient, ambitious. He acts quickly and does not disdain the competition. He is willingly extroverted, angry and even aggressive. He appears clearly stressed.

TYPE B: He is rather introverted, appears relaxed, patient. He does not conceive of life, his work as a struggle.

The study reinforces the link between Patients belonging to Profile A and the risk of occurrence of coronary heart disease. In fact, this risk appears to be twice as high in a Type A subject as in an individual belonging to Profile B.

Since the 1990s, beyond typology A or B, hostility, aggression, nervousness, overwork, anger, depressive state are all signs that define the fuzzy contours of cardio- in the stressed individual. This risk cannot, for the most part, be sufficient to explain the occurrence of a coronary event. However, we know that stress is often accompanied by tobacco abuse, high cholesterol, overweight and sedentary lifestyle. These risk factors are primarily involved in the occurrence of these diseases. Their association with stress is all the more deleterious on health, especially coronary.

So, can stress alone be responsible for a cardiovascular event? It is no longer rare for cardiologists to receive in consultation or to receive in intensive care individuals, often young, in whom we find no other factor promoting coronary disease that intense stress and often prolonged.

In Japan, karôshi is sometimes recognized as an occupational disease. This is major occupational overwork resulting in death by cardiac arrest. One of the essential mechanisms of these coronary problems of young adults seems to be related to hypersecretion of adrenaline which is harmful for the heart, especially through an acceleration of the heart rate. In the absence of a correlation currently demonstrated, we can only evoke the probable relationship between the acceleration of the heart rate and the risk of coronary heart disease.

Psychiatric complications

The anxiety is probably the first complication psychological stress. It consists of a state of alert, of psychological and somatic tension in relation to an unpleasant feeling of fear and worry. Physiological manifestations may accompany the state of anxiety: dizziness, nausea, palpitations, difficulty breathing, constriction of the chest, sweating. Nevertheless, when the physical symptoms are very present, the phenomenon is rather classified as anxiety.

The phobias seem influenced by stress. They are very frequent, especially since those who suffer from it now dare to talk about it. Indeed, a feeling of shame or fear of ridicule seems to minimize (is not that rather the meaning, in the perception of the frequency of phobias rather than in the reality of crises?) their frequency. This is a totally irrational fear triggered by certain situations: agoraphobia (fear of emptiness but also of the crowd), monophobia (fear of germs and diseases), fear of the highway, snakes, and spiders. Attention, it is not a mere fear or disgust but an intense fear accompanied by very unpleasant symptoms or even feeling of "impending death". We often find initial stress, a psychological shock before the onset of these panic attacks.

The depression sometimes appears as a successor to intense and prolonged stress. The signs of depression associate pell-mell fatigue, disinterest, the sadness of mood, wanting to do nothing or even real moral pain that can lead to a suicide attempt. One must certainly take into account the personality of the individual, perhaps psychologically fragile, and the context. We cannot ignore the occurrence, in recent years, cases of suicides many employees of a large French national telephone company. It seems that stress and overwork have been at the rendezvous.

Stress, so commonplace in the media and by doctors, themselves often poor, can probably kill. It must, therefore, be taken seriously, be detected early and treated.

Psychosomatic complications

Psychosomatic diseases are all disorders, syndromes or symptoms with a psychological basis.

In general, gastrointestinal disorders are the most frequent psychosomatic diseases: the liver, the intestines, and the colon are indeed the target organs of neuroses. Many stressed patients have functional colopathy that is sometimes very troublesome.

It has also been established that skin diseases if they are not related to a disease or a virus, would have a psychic origin. Psoriasis, which affects 2% of the French population, warts, herpes, excessive sweating, rosacea or eczema appear willingly due to annoyances and emotions.

Asthma and obesity have complex and multifactorial causes. However, in these frequent and chronic diseases stress appears, if not as a causative factor, as a perennial factor.

Immune complications

Let's be clear! At present, there is no sound medical study to suggest that AIDS or cancers are promoted by stress.

However, it is reasonable to assume that chronic stress can weaken the body's defenses. Many studies have been conducted in animals and sometimes in humans. The results are often contradictory: thus it was possible to show in the animal a fall of the immune defenses in the event of intense stress. To say that stress triggers or aggravates AIDS or cancer, there is only one step that no scientist crosses. AIDS remains a disease due to the development of a virus in the body. Cancers remain linked to uncontrolled tumor development favored, for some, by environmental or personal parameters.

In all cases, whether it is cancer or AIDS, the stress factor should not be neglected. Severe chronic diseases cause stress by themselves, putting the patient through a diagnosis of serious consequences and a long and difficult treatment to live on a daily basis. It will be important for the practitioners in charge of these patients to be attentive and to help them manage their stress, their anxiety or even a beginning of the depression.

The future and medical research may tell us one day if stress is responsible for all these ills. In any case, cardiovascular diseases kill. Anxiety, depression, obesity, and eating disorders are most likely to be stress-driven and often destroy the social and family fabric so necessary to humans. As for people with cancer or AIDS, they do not need additional stress!

Besides, it is best to beat depression in its own way. Jonathan Otto, a popular personality and research journalist, provides assistance to depression patients via his documentary series discussing the possible causes and how one can get rid of it without any serious medications.