Stress Less and Live Longer!
Dr. Wendy Zhou, ND
It is a known fact that cardiovascular events are the number 1 killer in both men and women in North America. But before we get to understand how your stress is connected, we have to talk about inflammation — the root of many chronic diseases.
Inflammation and Cardiovascular Events
Doctors have known that inflammation is bad for you for many years. We know that inflammation can cause atherosclerosis in normal arteries and therefore may affect our chances of having a heart attack or stroke. Biggest highlight in cardiovascular health research over the last two decades has been regarding the shift away from believing that cholesterol is the main reason why people have a cardiovascular event. The research went even more upstream than measuring your cholesterol (Triglyceride and LDL), they measured inflammation via inflammatory cytokines (signal molecules in the body that get released when there is an inflammatory event). What they found was surprising — older adults will have an experience cardiovascular events sometimes independent of your cholesterol numbers. They even found that inflammation is the driver of all stages of cardiovascular events; not only does inflammation initiate an event (heart attack or stroke), it also plays a key role in the progression, death, and complications after the event. It may contribute to thrombotic complications such as DVT, pulmonary embolism and ischemic limb after the fact.
How is stress linked with inflammation?
Your body automatically triggers the production of cortisol as soon as there is a perceived stress. However, throughout evolution, your body cannot differentiate the stress response needed to run away from a bear (survival) or answering an important email (perceived). It will elevate the stress hormone, cortisol, regardless of the situation. When cortisol is triggered, it drives inflammation which may contribute to our oxidative stress that leads to blood vessel damage, mitochondrial damage, or DNA damage. Corresponding to those damage — we have cardiovascular diseases and cancer diagnosis.
In the short term, increasing your cortisol level will not produce irreversible damage. However, in the long-term, a lot of the damages will become irreversible, therefore, decreasing longevity.
In 2004, the INTERHEART study (1) looked at 15,152 Myocardial Infarction (heart attack) patients and 14,820 no past cardiovascular events. They were followed for 4 years. Those people are stratified to match their gender, age, and other lifestyle factors. The study concluded that perceived stress via psychosocial stressors are significantly related to myocardial infarction risk in all compared population groups.
Measuring your stress is possible!
We can measure your cortisol level through saliva samples or urine samples! Saliva samples are the useful, but most tests have the technology to match urine samples to be very close to saliva .
In 2011, Kumari et al. (2) published a study (Whitehall II) where they followed 4047 men and women for 6 years measuring their stress via their saliva cortisol throughout the day. Normally, we would expect to see your cortisol level spike in the morning so you may wake up and complete your most important tasks. Then, your hormones naturally dip during the afternoon and should be at the lowest point by evening. We should see a curve similar to a mountain. However, the study was able to determine that people with a flatter cortisol curve (the mountain is smaller or rounder), are major predictors in dying from a cardiovascular event for middle-aged adults.
If we can predict someone’s cardiovascular risk by sampling the stress hormone, cortisol, through saliva, it deserves to be investigated if there is a cardiovascular risk in that person. Talk to one of the naturopathic doctors to run a test for you.
What can we do?
Start with the following:
- Breathe – practice regular breathing exercises or get into the habit of meditation or yoga.
- Exercise – when doing exercise, we often take away a lot of inflammation via the body’s natural clean-up protocols. However, those protocols only get triggered if we move to challenge our body.
- Manage stress by staying on aware of it – People usually have their own ways to manage stress. It can be through journaling or keeping a planner.
- Hold a stress-free time in your schedule – No matter how busy one can get, holding a stress-free block of time is important. Events such as reading for fun, playing music, going out with friends that you enjoy are just some of the suggestions.
If you have any questions regarding this article, please contact our naturopathic doctors at Naturopathic Living Solution and we will assess your cardiovascular risk for you.
References:
- Yusuf S, Hawken S, Ôunpuu S, Dans T, Avezum A, Lanas F, McQueen M, Budaj A, Pais P, Varigos J, Lisheng L. Effect of potentially modifiable risk factors associated with myocardial infarction in 52 countries (the INTERHEART study): case-control study. The lancet. 2004 Sep 11;364(9438):937-52.
- Kumari M, Shipley M, Stafford M, Kivimaki M. Association of diurnal patterns in salivary cortisol with all-cause and cardiovascular mortality: findings from the Whitehall II study. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2011 May 1;96(5):1478-85.