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Chronic Stress and Effects on Immune System PDF Print E-mail
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Stress and Immune System
     

Our immune system work to ways in event of foreign invaders like bacteria or virus

  • First is white blood cells (WBC) are take care of foreign elements like bacteria or virus
  • Cells make elements like antibodies that take care of weak points of foreign elements

At last this two type of immune systems are come to balance and keep our body system in control.

Some cell types contain receptors to the so-called stress hormones that lead to the activation of the cell, preparing it to fight pathogens, including many of the cell types involved in the cell-mediated immune response. Other cell types have lowered growth and activity when exposed to stress hormones.

 

Chronic stress is known to weaken the immune system, often leading to chronic diseases and increased levels of infection. Some hormones, are known to be immunosuppressive. Treatments for preventing rejection of organ transplants take advantage of this feature, as do many treatments for chronic autoimmune diseases.

Chronic stress may lead to decrease performance of the immune response. In chronic-stress situations, the immune effectors cells are constantly being stimulated for battle but they never encounter a pathogen. Because the cells are activated and easy to stimulate further into a large-scale immune response, they may mistakenly attack the organism's own tissues; therefore, having a built-in safety mechanism to turn the immune cells off when they're continuously exposed to high levels of stimuli is protective to the organism. This may cause the cells to become tolerant to the constantly high levels of the stress hormones.

Chronic stress significantly lowers the immune response.

  • White blood cells not encountering stress hormones have low levels of receptors for the hormones.
  • Upon stimulation and exposure to sudden increases in stress hormones the white blood cells become active and begin to make more receptors for the stress hormones.
  • The white blood cells continue to receive the stimulus of high levels of stress hormones, but they don't have any invader to attack, so they gradually become tolerant to the levels of the stress hormones and accept high levels as normal.
  • When an invader does come in, the white blood cells are used to the high levels of stress hormones already present in the organism. Since the organism can't increase the levels of stress hormones further, the WBC don't become stimulated, so they may attack the invader with less efficiency and effectiveness. This leads to an immune-compromised condition.
  • Chronic stress affects the immune system by increasing sympathetic activity and decreasing cellular immunity.
  • Immune cells migrate to different parts of the body and can worsen autoimmune and allergic conditions.

Chronic stress appears to decrease the immune system's response to infections, and may even decrease a person's response to immunizations. People under chronic stress have low white blood cell counts and are vulnerable to colds. And once any person catches a cold or flu, stress can make symptoms worse.

Chronic stress triggers an over-production of certain immune factors called cytokines, which in excess levels can have very damaging effects. In fact, such findings may partly explain the association between chronic stress and numerous diseases, including heart disease and asthma.

 

 


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