The Stress Response

It makes sense that the body adapts based on its stress-response.
Vertebrates rely on muscles during the stress-response, requiring readily available energy.
The stress-response involves mobilizing energy from storage sites and inhibiting further storage.
Glucose, proteins, and fats are released from fat cells, the liver, and muscles to fuel muscle activity.
Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate increase to transport nutrients and oxygen.
During emergencies, the body halts long-term building projects such as digestion, growth, and reproduction.
Digestion is inhibited because it's energetically inefficient during emergencies.
Growth and tissue repair are curtailed, sexual drive decreases in both sexes.
Females are less likely to ovulate or carry pregnancies to term, while males have erection problems and decreased testosterone.
Immunity is inhibited with the body prioritizing immediate energy expenditure over long-term defense.
During extreme physical pain perception can be blunted
Stress-induced analgesia is adaptive, allowing the body to escape immediate threats.
Memory improves and senses sharpen during stress.
The stress-response mobilizes energy, defers long-term projects, blunts pain, and sharpens cognition.
Walter Cannon emphasized the adaptive aspect of the stress-response in emergencies, coining the "fight-or-flight" syndrome.
Selye's three-part view of the stress-response involved an alarm stage, an adaptation stage, and an exhaustion stage where diseases emerge.
Selye believed diseases occurred when stress hormone stores were depleted, but key hormones are rarely depleted.
Diseases emerge with sufficient stress activation making the stress-response more damaging than the stressor, especially psychological stress.
Short-sighted and inefficient reactions to stress occur such as constant energy mobilization without storage leads to fatigue and increased diabetes risk.
Chronically activating the cardiovascular system such as rising to 180/100 blood pressure can lead to disaster.
Long-term building projects being turned off constantly, nothing gets repaired, increasing risk for peptic ulcers.
Growth can be inhibited in kids like stress dwarfism while in adults, bone and tissue repair may be disrupted.
Reproductive disorders may occur such as irregular menstrual cycles in females or declined testosterone levels in males.
Immune function being suppressed leads to infectious and autoimmune diseases.
Brain systems that function cleverly during stress can be damaged, leading to memory loss during aging.
Allostasis, or precarious balance, comes at a cost and wears the body down over time.
Using two elephants on a seesaw as a metaphor for stress-related disease involves energy being diverted from long-term projects to solve short-term emergencies and damages occur due to elephants being large and lumbering.
Balancing with elephants makes it tough to get off, representing stress-related disease arising from turning turning off stress-response too slowly.

Addison's Disease and Shy-Drager Syndrome

When facing challenges, needing the stress-response is critical; Addison's and Shy-Drager syndromes represent catastrophic failures of turning on stress-response.

Stress-Response

Stress-response can become damaging if repeatedly turned on, or not turned off
Stress related diseases are disorders of excessive stress-responses.
Stressors, even if chronic, do not automatically lead to illness. Stressors increase the risk of diseases that make one sick.

Brain Function

The brain can regulate functions and influence body processes through thoughts.
Brain activity can trigger physiological responses throughout the body.

Autonomic Nervous System

The brain communicates with the body through nerves.
The voluntary nervous system allows conscious movement.
The autonomic nervous system controls involuntary responses and is related to the stress response.
One half of the autonomic nervous system is activated during stress, while the other half is suppressed.

Sympathetic Nervous System

The sympathetic nervous system is activated during emergencies.
It helps mediate vigilance, arousal, activation, and mobilization.
Mediates the "four F's" of behavior: flight, fight, fright, and sex.
The nerve endings of this system release epinephrine and norepinephrine.

Parasympathetic Component

The parasympathetic component of the autonomic nervous system mediates calm.
Promotes growth, energy storage, and other optimistic processes.
The autonomic system works in opposition as sympathetic and parasympathetic projections from the brain cause opposite results.

Brain's Communication

The neural route using the sympathetic system is a means by which the brain can mobilize activity during stress.
The brain also secretes messengers in the bloodstream, which is a hormone
The brain has to do with glands secreting hormones.
Previously, it was thought that peripheral glands knew what they were doing, and how to secrete messengers, without directions.
When men's sexual drive declines with age, the testosterone levels are lower, which lead to aging.
The solution was to give aging males testicular extracts in Swiss sanitariums through injections.
After World War I, there was a shortage of men and a marriage of old men and young women, this seemed an important therapy.
The problem was is didn't work.
They would be injected with a water-based extract and testosterone does not go into solution in water.
Those that were transplanted, would die immediately from the scar tissue.

Pituitary Gland

Pituitary gland releases hormone only if the pituitary first releases a hormone that kicks that gland into action.
The pituitary contains hormones that regulate the body
If you remove the pituitary from the body and put into a small bowl of nutrients, the gland would act abnormally.
One of the brain's section is destroyed, the pituitary stops secreting and secretes too much of others.

Hormones

In 1944, Geoffrey Harris proposed that the brain was also a hormonal gland, and that it released hormones that traveled to the pituitary and directed those actions
Brain produces hormones from peripheal like testes and ovaries-Roger Guilemine
They were highly motivated by clinical applications and losthed each other/ which intivigorated the quest.
They collaborated the search for the hormones where the actual events have shrunk into obscirty-resulting in animosity like Greeks and Trojans.
The key was that Roger was isolating the hormones and seeing if it regulates pituitary function.
There as a minuscle amount of the hormones so Roger wound up dealing them at a time.
He would collect pigs or sheep where the chemists poured the cauldron of mash.
These new inventions of chemistry resulted in one new result which had to be a testing effective method.

Hormone Success

Roger Guilemine proved to isolate the Putiaine hormone in 14 years
They received te nobel prize in 1976 for their effort.
The hypothalamus contains releasing and and inhibiting hormones.
The brain triggers pituitary to release hormone x.
Hormones that vital to the stress-response- epinephrine and norepinephrine are released by the sympathetic nervous system.

Glucocorticoids

Class of homrones in response to stress-glucocorticoids-they come into play seconds after epophrnine occurs to back it up for minutes or hours
Steroid is used to describe chemical structure androgrens and estrogens and progestins and glucocorticoids.
Adrenal gland release must is to control the hormones from the brain.
Hypothalamus sectrets releasing hormones into pituitary to get ball rolling
CRH (corticotropin releasing hormone),
ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone)