Horrible moments in life not only cause additional stress, but a new study has found that such an event could even increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Scientists found that if a person had a traumatic experience, such as divorce or death, at a young age, they were more likely to show symptoms of illness than those who escaped unscathed.
By taking samples of the participants’ spinal fluid, they found that people who were more stressed had more types of proteins floating around in their bodies associated with Alzheimer’s disease than those who didn’t have the disease.
Research has noted that This is only true if these stressful events took place during your childhood or middle age,
Despite decades of dedicated research and the fact that nearly seven million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s disease, scientists have yet to determine the cause of the disease.
There is some evidence that this could be caused by genes and some evidence could be related to the environment.
But researchers know that when a person develops Alzheimer’s disease, their body begins to produce many more of two types of the body’s natural proteins, called amyloid and tau.
Since the brain is connected to the spinal cord, you can sample fluid from the spinal cavity to determine if your brain is producing more of these proteins.
This could be an accurate way to detect Alzheimer’s disease, according to a 2018 study of 1,016 patients by Columbia University.
This is the test that Spanish researchers did so in their new paper, published in the Annals of Neurology of the American Neurological Association.
By testing the spinal fluid of all 1,290 participants, researchers found that people who experienced a stressful event early or mid-life had higher amounts of amyloid and tau.
Carol Opdebeeck, a psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, wrote in The Conversation that There is evidence that “stressful life events, such as the death of a loved one or divorce, put a person at higher risk of developing dementia later in life.”
Researchers provide a number of explanations for their conclusions.
First, they said, anxiety in response to stressful events is common. Scientists know that anxiety and stress are bad for the body.
Click here to resize this module
When you’re stressed, your immune system responds as if you’ve been injured and you feel inflammation throughout your body, which can accelerate aging, said Dr. Susan Albers, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Second, stressful events can cause your body to release a certain type of steroid, called glucocorticoids, which in large amounts have been shown to damage brain cells.
Finally, when animals are placed in stressful environments, they have a harder time digesting amyloid and tau, the researchers wrote.
Whatever the cause of their findings, the researchers wrote that more work remains to be done to understand whether this is applicable across the board.
For his part, Professor Opdebeeck wrote that the study could help us better understand how dementia develops and, therefore, “will contribute to finding effective ways to intervene early, and perhaps even to reduce the number of people who develop dementia.
News Source : www.dailymail.co.uk
Gn Health
