Chronic stress spreads cancer
cshl.edu
cshl.edu
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15356...
Summary
Chronic stress is associated with increased risk of metastasis and poor survival in cancer patients, yet the reasons are unclear. We show that chronic stress increases lung metastasis from disseminated cancer cells 2- to 4-fold in mice. Chronic stress significantly alters the lung microenvironment, with fibronectin accumulation, reduced T cell infiltration, and increased neutrophil infiltration. Depleting neutrophils abolishes stress-induced metastasis. Chronic stress shifts normal circadian rhythm of neutrophils and causes increased neutrophil extracellular trap (NET) formation via glucocorticoid release. In mice with neutrophil-specific glucocorticoid receptor deletion, chronic stress fails to increase NETs and metastasis. Furthermore, digesting NETs with DNase I prevents chronic stress-induced metastasis. Together, our data show that glucocorticoids released during chronic stress cause NET formation and establish a metastasis-promoting microenvironment. Therefore, NETs could be targets for preventing metastatic recurrence in cancer patients, many of whom will experience chronic stress due to their disease.
I wonder why they only used female mice. In the original methods study about the effect of stress on hair loss both male and female mice are used.
Other non drug alternatives: Meditation, acupuncture, camping, horse back riding, walks, runs, swimming all seem effective at lowering stress as well from my exp.
Healthy livestyle in general and meditation are good obviously - but in his case drugs apparently did help: LSD and psybicilin. To let go of some stress inducing thought patterns. ( he did use lots of it for some time) So in his case it was largely a success - but of course it can also go very wrong. So I am not recommending it, just sharing a anecdota of a case where it was helpful. As far as I understood, when you are experiencing cluster headaches - you are willing to try everything, to not experience it again, so all the best to you and anyone else experiencing it.
I am having trouble parsing this sentence. Did you mean "quiet"?
The issue isn’t the doctors, it’s that society, or even just the human condition, often makes it impossible to eliminate the source of chronic stress.
Indeed, all my chronic stress can immediately be solved with large quantities of money.
I thought this way too, and then made a bunch of money to the point I no longer had to work after around 35. I can tell you first hand with my n=1 study that more money is not very impactful. You’re still you, with all the hangups and other things to work through. Focus on achieving income to meet your necessities and a bit more and then put your energy into relationships and your health and fitness, and hobbies. More money at the expense of these other things is a fool’s bargain.
I appreciate the “money doesn’t buy happiness” advice, even if it comes from someone that was financially independent at 35 - good for you! - but you are making some _wild_ assumptions about the causes of my chronic stress, none of which have to do with my hangups, or hobbies, or anything else like that.
I have had financial lows, with “low” being “homeless at 17” and I have had some financial highs, with “high” being “impactful startup exit”. I have never made assumptions about what would solve someone else’s’ problems, and I would dream of making the presumption of telling them that the thing they have identified as their issue isn’t really their issue.
$5m a year would make me plenty happy, thanks, and would absolutely allow me to focus on my health and fitness, and take up a hobby. Right now, there are not enough hours in the day for any of those kind of luxuries.
So 75k is more the floor not a ceiling.
All it really supports is having universal basic income.
From this perspective, mechanisms that prolong life in favourable circumstances but curtail in difficult times, make sense.
I think we need to substantiate this more. Where does "higher" lifeform begin? And is this statement really true?
There are trees older than 4k years and some whales become 200 years old.
Before life, there was only death. At some point, something life-like sprung into existence, and soon died. And then it happened again. At some point it was able to reproduce, and then died.
Death is the default. It was always there. Some things managed to cheat it long enough to reproduce. Those things are alive.
This is why I don’t see that organisms evolved to die. The very first life-like things were dying, before they had the ability to reproduce.
Agreed, but..
> Dying is a prerequisite to evolution. If every individual were to survive, the gene pool would not converge towards more advantageous adaptations.
This is kinda wrong. Reproduction is the perquisite for evolution. Evolution does not care much about your "survival" as a whole, especially after you reproduced. In "Survival of the fittest", you can better think of survival on the level of genes, not individuals, for the most part.
I need a source on that, because for the most part that's not how evolution works.
At the point of reproduction, the moment genes are passed on, the paternal time of death isn't "known" to natural selection. Generally speaking, there really is no way to put pressure on death like you suggested. Except maybe for some group selection mechanics, where scientific consensus would be far from settled, and it wouldn't qualify for any statement on "all higher lifeforms", anyway.
What's true tho, evolution doesn't care too much about your survival after reproduction, either. So, eg. some early in life adaptations may increase your chances of death later in life - live fast, die young.
But that's really different than saying death has this evolutionary purpose like you suggested. Complicated things just fall apart at some point. That's so much a fact, that large animals like whales and elephants actually do need "anti-cancer" adaptations to bring their plenty of cells into reproductive age.
Also, I think people may be prone to an anachronistic fallacy in regard to dying here. See, 1 in 5 people will die because of cancer, it's a pretty "natural" thing in our lives, but.... human cancer rates are actually mostly down to environmental and lifestyle factors. Before civilization and industrialization cancer was rare. Yes, people live longer to see it happen, but for example lung cancer is almost always attributable to some hazard exposure. Smoking increases your risk by 2000% (!), yet most smokers won't get lung cancer - lung cancer is that rare!
Alcohol, houses on radon soil, highly processed food, VOCs, hexavalent chromium, heavy metals, estrogenic plasticizer, asbestos, sedentary lives, obesity, microplastic, nanoparticles, ... stress. We could have cashed in on maternal and child mortality to fix our stats, but hey: you win, you lose.
The primary cause of anxiety is chronic stress. Chronic stress most typically occurs when a fear or aggression memory is stamped in the amygdala in the brain. The left and right amygdalas are asymmetrical and process different tasks in humans, by the way. In a healthy person a fear memory is generated in the amygdala which loops through other areas of the limbic system before coming back to the amygdala with additional emotional processing, but before looping more the fear process is halted by flooding the amygdala with a suppressor, GABA. In unhealthy people GABA is not released into the process at appropriate moments resulting in a run away loop of building negative emotions. GABA is also produced, as a regulator, by the immune system.
As an aside the immune system also produces another neurotransmitter responsible for both immune system excitement that plays an unrelated role of emotional motivation in the brain. That is why antihistamines medications make people drowsy, because suppressing that neurotransmitter via medication occurs in utero.
You mean histamine? I think antihistamines make people drowsy, because histamine signaling at the H1-Receptor is involved with regulation of the circadian rhythm [1][2]. As far as I know, histamine is released, as part of the immune system, by mast cells, which have to be triggered by IgE (parasite / "macro stuff" / "allergy") antibodies.
Neither the "H1 receptor", "H1 antagonist", "Histamine", "Tuberomammillary nucleus" nor "Mast cell" Wikipedia article match "GABA".
> because suppressing that neurotransmitter via medication occurs in utero.
What does this even mean? I mean, I don't know...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histamine_H1_receptor#Neurophy...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histamine#Sleep-wake_regulatio...
There's a sweet spot, I think, between barely scraping by, and keeping up with the Joneses.
"An unhealthy obsession with sickness increases risk of dying, study says"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/12/25/hypochondri...
The problem is with chronic stress. In humans it is the chronic social stress. The digestion is impaired, the immune system is impaired.
I highly recommend this for a read on how stress alters the body.
Sample size = 1 from me.
The less snarky remark would be that Robert Sapolsky has done plenty of research on stress responses in primates and found that the single largest predictor of high stress responses is inequality, which our modern times do seem to generate in abundance.
> anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies.
Perhaps being able to think doesn't help much when it comes to happiness. Thinking is useful practically but it's as if you have to suppress it in order to experience happiness.
You should read a bit about their sex lives...