Impacts of Chronic Stress on the Body

Impacts of Chronic Stress on the Body
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Impacts of Chronic Stress on the Body
Through a complex system of communication among organs, the body can respond and adapt itself to acute stress. However, organs become strained due to chronic stress. Stress occurs from challenging situations in life that trigger specific physiological, psychological, and biological responses. The most significant thing about stress is that it affects all the systems of the human body, including gastrointestinal, reproductive, endocrine, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and respiratory (American Psychological Association, 2018). The communication among body organs is triggered by chemical messengers, such as neurotransmitters and hormones. For example, the pituitary gland releases hormones upon sensing the body's needs. These chemical messengers pass into the bloodstream and transmit information that makes specific organs react accordingly. The adrenocorticotropic hormone stimulates adrenal glands to secrete cortisol. Chronic stress tampers with the body's communication system among organs. As such, it causes adverse impacts on the body.
Chronic stress tampers with the body tissues and cells composition, which is essential for people's health. Indeed, it leads to the hypersecretion of hormones and other chemical messengers responsible for the coordination of different organs. Chronic stress causes various diseases, such as anxiety, depression, type two diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, and autoimmune disorders. In addition, it fosters osteosarcopenia or frailty, chronic systemic inflammation, cellular dehydration, and psychological and somatic manifestations (Stefanaki et al., 2018). In some cases, chronically stressed individuals forget to drink water, which is crucial in metabolism, shock-absorbing, lubrication, and thermoregulation. In the metabolism process, water acts as the solution medium and reactant. A person of average weight and height has an extracellular water volume of 40% and intracellular volume of 60% (Stefanaki et al., 2018). Homeostatic mechanism regulates body hydration and involves kidneys, cardiovascular system, and the brain. When an individual has chronic stress, it affects the homeostatic balance maintained by the volume of water excreted, water percentage in food, water uptake, and water used during metabolism. The pituitary gland releases the antidiuretic hormone (ADH), which is activated by the hypothalamic osmoreceptors (Stefanaki et al., 2018). What is more, chronic stress disrupts the osmotic pressure in the extracellular fluid compartment (ECF). ECF and ADH are the ones that make a person feel thirsty, and upon drinking water, the normal osmotic pressure is restored. One of the adverse effects of chronic stress is that it causes the ECF osmotic pressure imbalance, meaning that the body and cells become dehydrated, which makes them not function optimally.
Individuals' exposure to chronic stress results in the loss of spines and dendrites in the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC). In particular, PFC is responsible for regulating people's thoughts, actions, and emotions. Weakening PFC functionality has adverse effects on individuals' behaviors. Studies have shown that people's exposure to hypoxia, head trauma, physiological stressors, and psychological inflammation can lead to impaired PFC functions. The loss of dendritic spines' synapses is caused by physiological and psychological stressors (Woo, Sansing, Arnsten, & Datta, 2021). Besides, it causes reduced cognitive abilities, including poor decision-making, extinction of conditioned responses to fear, and decreased working memory performance. Chronic stress has negative impacts on the PFC circuits and can lead to visceral and irrational actions, thinking processes, and emotional responses. As a result, people should know how to combat chronic stress to avoid the adverse effects it poses on the PFC.
Furthermore, chronic stress promotes rapid cognitive and body aging. People exposed to chronic stress think irrationally, become socially isolated, and have poor working memory. They also lack vocabulary richness, meaning that they keep repeating words and phrases that they use. In particular, chronic psychological stress causes depressive, post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), autoimmune, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative disorders (Yegorov et al., 2020). Moreover, it stimulates the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which trigger inflammation. The overproduction of ROS leads to cellular damage and macromolecule metabolism alterations, which are linked to the development of aging phenotypes (Rohleder, 2019). Researchers found people suffering from chronic stress with selected oxidative stress-induced telomere biomarkers that were not present in healthy individuals. In reality, ROS causes irreversible oxidative decay, which promotes the impairment of physiological functions. The process not only increases the incidence of individuals' exposure to illnesses but it decreases people's lifespan. Oxidative stress causes endogenous system inactivity when it comes to fighting against pathogen attacks. Mitochondria is the primary ROS producer. Most importantly, chronic stress leads to mitophagy or mitochondrial dysfunction. Yegorov et al. (2020) affirm that defective mitochondria acquire senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), which fosters accelerated aging (Yegorov et al., 2020). The worst incident might take place if the immune system recognizes mitochondria's deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) as microorganisms. If a person's immune system starts to attack mitochondria, it leads to a long-term source of pro-inflammatory factors. Overall, it becomes difficult to stop that process, and it contributes to further premature aging.
Chronic stress fuels neuronal degeneration, leading to Parkinson's disease (PD). Specifically, PD entails a neurodegenerative illness that is characterized by selective dopaminergic neurons present in the nigrostriatal pathway. PD patients exhibit gut microbiota dysbiosis, intestinal hyperpermeability, and endotoxemia. They encounter high levels of stress, and their cortisol levels are high (Dodiya et al., 2020). What is more, chronic stress damages dopamine cells and causes severe PD symptoms. People's exposure to uncontrollable stressful situations for a long period leads to numerous hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) changes (Bruder-Nascimento et al., 2013). The HPA axis triggers different organs when individuals become stressed to counter the impacts of stress. Some organs include the pituitary glands, hypothalamus, and adrenal cortex, which release hormones and other chemical messengers that make the body respond to stress appropriately. PD pathogenesis causes specific motor symptoms, such as hyperkinesia, postural instability, rigidity, resting tremor, and bradykinesia. Some of the non-motor signs that lead to PD include anxiety, cognitive impairment, and depression (Dalle & Mabandla, 2018). Despite PD being a progressive illness, it influences the basal ganglia adversely. Specifically, the basal ganglia constitute the subthalamic nucleus, substantia nigra, putamen, globus pallidus, and caudate nucleus. All these components w...