“People with higher stress scores have older-looking immune profiles, with lower proportions of new disease fighters and higher proportions of degraded T cells,” Klopak said.
In addition to finding that people who reported higher stress levels had more zombie cells, Klopak and his team also found that they also had fewer “naive” T cells, the newly created cells needed to confront new invaders.
“This paper adds to the findings that psychological stress on the one hand, and well-being and resources on the other, are associated with immune aging,” said clinical psychologist Susan Segerstrom, who was not involved in the study.
Segerstrom, professor of developmental, social, and health psychology at the University of Kentucky at Lexington, has studied the relationship between self-regulation, stress, and immune function.
“In one of our most recent studies… Older adults with more psychic resources had ‘younger’ T cells,” Segerstrom said.
bad health behaviors
Study participants were asked questions about their levels of social stress, which included “stressful life events, chronic stress, daily discrimination and lifelong discrimination,” Klopak said. Their responses were then compared with the levels of T cells found in blood tests.
“It’s the first time that detailed information on immune cells has been collected in a large national survey,” Klopak said. “We found that older adults with lower proportions of naive cells and higher proportions of older T cells had older immune systems.”
The study found that the association between stressful life events and fewer naive T cells remained strong even after controlling for education, smoking, drinking, weight, and race or ethnicity, Klopak said.
However, when poor diet and lack of exercise were taken into account, some of the relationship between levels of social stress and an aging immune system disappeared.
This finding suggests that how well our immune system progresses when we are stressed is under our control, Klopak said.
How does stress affect the brain?
Experts say that as the body is flooded with stress hormones, neural circuits in the brain change, affecting our ability to think and make decisions. Anxiety rises and mood may change. All of these neurological changes affect the whole body, including our autonomic, metabolic, and immune systems.
McEwen, who made the landmark discovery in 1968 that the brain’s hippocampus can be altered by stress hormones like cortisol, died in 2020 after 54 years of research in neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University in New York City.
Feeling ‘stressed’ may also lead to neglecting to see friends, taking time off from our work, or reducing our participation in regular physical activity, where we sit, for example, in front of a computer and try to get out from under the load of too much to do, McQueen wrote.
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