Questions:
1.Stress can cause your hair to fall out in clumps. T/F
2.Stress can cause sudden cardiac death in people with no previous symptoms of heart disease. T/F
3.Stress causes ulcers. T/F
4.Just being in the doctor's office can cause your blood pressure to rise. T/F
5.Chronic stress can gradually raise your bad cholesterol, your blood pressure, your resting heart rate and your triglyceride levels. T/F
6.Stress can cause memory loss. T/F
7.Stress can cause premature aging. T/F
Answers
1.True: According to the Mayo Clinic "stress and hair loss can be related." The medical term for this is alopecia areata.
2.True: Dr. Martin Samuels of Brigham and Woman's hospital is a cardiologist who studies the relationship between thinking and heart disease. He collects examples of cases where perfectly healthy adults die from massive doses of stress chemicals released in the blood stream, which is rare, but it does happen. See this article in the Wall Street Journal: Even Fit People Can Be Scared to Death
3.False but possibly True: Nowadays the medical community takes the position that ulcers are caused by a bacteria that lives in the gut (h. pylori) and NOT by stress. When it gets out of control it causes ulcers and because it can be brought under control with antibiotics, it's NOT stress-related. However since these bacteria already occur in the guts of 80% of adults, the vast majority of whom, don't have and never will have an ulcer, why does it get out of control in some folks and not others? Stress experts, like Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, still wonder if stress doesn't have something to do with WHY it gets out of control.
4.True: The medical term for this is white-coat hypertension. Most doctors will take a second reading before diagnosing high blood pressure, just to make sure that stress isn't the cause.
5.True: During a stressful episode, all these biomarkers rise, and after stress they reset back to their original set points. But chronic stress, over time, gradually raises the set points of these biomarkers out of the healthy range.
6.True: Stress shrinks the neurons in the hippocampus causing memory loss, which is the same area brain that is attacked by Alzheimer's.
7.True: Stress accelerates the aging process. If you don't know about how stress, cellular aging and shortened telomeres read this article from Psychology Today.