Studies suggest that high levels of stress can lead to obesity and trigger a raft of diseases — from heart attacks to ulcers. These and other stress-related diseases sicken millions of people each year in the USA, says brain researcher Bruce McEwen at the Rockefeller University in New York.

Up to 90% of the doctor visits in the USA may be triggered by a stress-related illness, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Stress is the body's response to having an argument or getting hit with an unexpected tax bill. The adrenal glands crank out hormones like adrenaline that drive up blood pressure. With chronic stress, those hormones stay at dangerously high levels.

And now, new research suggests that over-the-top stress can go beyond the temporary increase in blood pressure to actually injure cells of the body. That injury may accelerate the aging process, leaving people prone to a laundry list of diseases.

Stress works at the cellular level

Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues turned to women under a crushing burden of stress: mothers of sick kids. The researchers began to peer deep inside their cells to see if stress affected a key part of the chromosome called a telomere.

Telomeres are thought to be markers of aging, says co-author Richard Cawthon of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Telomeres cap the ends of chromosomes, which contain the body's DNA.

As people get older, this cap gets ground down. When the telomere gets too short to work properly, cells all over the body start to sicken or die — and diseases of old age set in, Cawthon says.

The California researchers found that the longer women had been caring for a child with a serious illness, the shorter the telomere, a finding that suggests rapid aging.

But the toxic stress response wasn't confined to caregivers: This study, published in the Nov. 30 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that stress also affected mothers of healthy kids.

Most of the women in this group, the control group, didn't report burn-out levels of stress. But those that did had the same response: shorter telomeres.

In fact, when the researchers looked only at stressed-out women in either group, they found a dramatic sign of damage. "They had lost the amount of telomeric DNA that one would expect to lose in 10 years of aging," Epel says.

Researchers Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser at Ohio State University turned to a different group of people under grinding stress: caregivers of Alzheimer's patients, people who often put in 100 hours a week or more on care for someone who has this progressive brain disease.

The team began to look for a damaging substance in the blood called interleukin-6, or Il-6.

Il-6 levels go up as people get older. "But caregivers had levels of Il-6 that increased dramatically," Glaser says. Overly ramped-up Il-6 might make caregivers vulnerable to diseases common among the elderly, such as arthritis, he says.

The average caregiver was about 70 but had Il-6 levels that looked like those of a 90-year-old, Kiecolt-Glaser says.

A positive outlook can help

We all have stressful things happen to us. You can have a divorce, be in a car accident — there are so many things that cause stress.

Does that stress doom us to DNA damage? Probably not.

Caregivers in the UCSF study who viewed their situation positively didn't seem to suffer the ill effects of stress, Epel says. A positive outlook on life and the support of friends might help buffer a damaging stress response, she says.

Techniques for Conquering Stress include:

• Regular exercise
• Prayer or meditation (qigong)
• Asking for help when demands are overwhelming
• Developing a support network of friends or family members
• Regarding unavoidable stress as an opportunity for growth

"We cultivate our own life energy (qi) by accessing nature's great store of qi. This approach produces quick results. But cultivating one's qi is not the most fundamental; cultivating one's spirit is. Mastery of qi is really achieved through mastery of consciousness. We use consciousness in a careful, craftsman-like way, to shape our life, to attain our goals. If we use modern terminology to name this process, we call it qigong..." "…In modern terms, qigong is just the refinement of consciousness to enhance the state of energy in the body. This leads to vibrant health, a harmonious body and mind, and an awakened spiritual life.
Dr. Ming Pang, creator of Zhineng Qigong

“Spiritual practices that involve the physical body, such as t’ai chi, qigong, and yoga, are also increasingly being embraced in the Western world. These practices do not create a separation between body and spirit... ...They will play an important role in the global awakening.” Quoted from 'A New Earth' by Eckhart Tolle.

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