In general, stress refers to the mental pressure to cause changes in response to mental and physical stimulation.
When an external ‘stress factor’ occurs, physiological responses such as tension, arousal, excitement, and anxiety appear.
Stress can be viewed as a reaction to undo external pressure.
It is a well-known fact that stress is harmful to health. There is even a saying that stress is the ‘root of all diseases’.
It is presumed that stress may have had a bad effect on the corona pandemic, which has been over two years old.
Research has shown that this inference is true.
The key point is that the immune response is markedly weakened when you are under severe stress while being infected with COVID-19 (coronavirus infection) or influenza (flu) virus.
The research team also discovered for the first time the mechanism by which specific areas of the brain control the immune response of cells.
The results of this study conducted by scientists at Mount Sinai Medical School in the United States were published as a thesis in the journal Nature on the 30th (local time).
The greatest achievement of this study is to find out how stress negatively affects the immune response.
This is the first time that this mechanism has been confirmed through scientific experiments.
This finding is also expected to help explain the reason for the large difference in the degree of perjury between individuals of novel coronavirus or influenza virus infection.
The area immediately affected by severe stress was ‘paraventricular hypothalamus’.
Stress stimulated neurons (nerve cells) in this area to induce large migration of white blood cells.
White blood cells from the lymph nodes are transferred to the blood and bone marrow all at once.
This weakens the immune response and resistance to viral infection, and increases the risk of infection complications and death.
The researchers compared the immune responses of stressed and relaxed mice as models.
In the severely stressed mice, a large migration of white blood cells was observed within minutes.
When it was confirmed with advanced technologies such as optogenetics, it was the ventricular tuberculosis hypothalamus that was stimulated immediately when stress occurred.
Mice in a comfortable state fought off viral infection better than the ‘stress group’ and cleared the virus more easily.
Stressed mice have weakened immune systems, resulting in more severe viral infections and more deaths.
The researchers also found that motor function areas of the brain are involved when different types of immune cells move from the bone marrow to the blood.
The experiment also revealed that the distribution of white blood cells throughout the body and the areas of the brain that control white blood cell function are distinctly different when subjected to severe stress.
Of course, the focus of the study was on the hypothalamus of ventricular tuberculosis and the area responsible for motor function.
The fact that stress negatively affects white blood cells and lowers the body’s virus immunity seems to be an important reference for future immunity research.
For example, if white blood cells move too long, scientists say, they can harm your cardiovascular health.
In any case, it is clear that stress has a detrimental effect on the human immune system and defense once morest viral infections.
Dr. Philip Swaski, director of the Cardiovascular Research Center at Lee Medical School and the corresponding author of the paper, said, “It is important to know how to create resilience to stress and to reduce the negative effects of stress on the immune system with such resilience. We need to understand it more deeply.”
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