Stressing Fitness

One nationwide study in the months following the attacks found that 4% of Americans were suffering from 9/11-related posttraumatic stress disorder, including a whopping 11.2% of New Yorkers.

Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Diego, studies anxiety's effects on decision-making. "Under certain circumstances anxious people are more sensitive in detecting potentially bad outcomes associated with choices. They do avoid harm, so, as a consequence, it may be useful to be anxious," he says.

Paulus and his team have found that anxious people tend to take a "bottom-up" approach to life—their emotional reactions to events are stronger, while their ability to reason and intellectually interpret events is weaker. "Chronically anxious peoples' brains experience everything as aversive," he says. Less anxious people, in contrast, take more of a "top-down" approach—the rational parts of their brain take over when they experience something potentially anxiety inducing, and they essentially talk themselves into not getting worked up.

People with a history of heart disease who are prone to negative thinking, gloom, and inhibition -- a personality profile known as Type D (for "distressed") -- are nearly four times more likely to experience heart attack, heart failure, heart rhythm disorders, death, and other negative outcomes compared to heart patients with a different personality profile, the study found.

"There is a clear connection between heart risk and psychological risk factors, and those people who have this personality and lack social support have higher risk of health problems,"

Type D personalities are "characterized by negative emotions like anxiety, frustration, and anger, and at the same time score high on social inhibition, meaning that they are less likely to disclose emotions," Denollet says.

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low in saturated fats can significantly lower the risk of heart attack for people with mildly elevated blood pressure, Johns Hopkins University researchers say.

The diet they examined — called the DASH diet (dietary approaches to stop hypertension) — was designed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. In this new study, it reduced the risk of heart attack by almost 20%, the researchers said.

The diet also calls for reducing fats, red meat, sweets and sugary beverages, and replacing them with whole grains, poultry, low-fat dairy products, fish and nuts.

Exercises that look like pilates or yoga routines are in. And the traditional bane of the new private, the long run, has been downgraded. This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.

“What we were finding was that the soldiers we’re getting in today’s Army are not in as good shape as they used to be,” said Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, who oversees basic training for the Army. “This is not just an Army issue. This is a national issue.”

“Between 1995 and 2008, the proportion of potential recruits who failed their physicals each year because they were overweight rose nearly 70 percent,”

Inflammation is known to be boosted by stressful situations. But when yoga experts were exposed to stress (such as dipping their feet in ice water,) they experienced less of an increase in their inflammatory response than yoga novices did.

Yoga focuses on deep breathing and controlling breathing, which may slow down the body's "fight or flight" response — the body's reaction to stress, Kiecolt-Glaser said.

Yoga also involves meditation, which helps people learn to pay attention to how they are feeling. So yoga experts may be more aware of their stress and better able to control their response to it.

Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

Stress has been cited frequently as a factor in autoimmune diseases, including alopecia areata.

A study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Oxford supports the widespread belief that stress may reduce a woman's chance of becoming pregnant. The study is the first of its kind to document, among women without a history of fertility problems, an association between high levels of a substance indicative of stress and a reduced chance of becoming pregnant.

The researchers found that, all other factors being equal, women with high alpha-amylase levels were less likely to conceive than were women with low levels, during the fertile window -- the six days when conception is most likely to occur.

Between 1988-94 and 2005-06, the percentage of teens with hearing loss jumped by about a third, from 15% of 12-to-19-year-olds to 19.5%.

Diet and nutrition, as well as exposure to toxins, might be factors. Living in poverty is also associated with greater risk of hearing loss among youngsters, as children in lower-income families may not be getting adequate nutrition to support proper development of the auditory system.

Difficulty in hearing among youngsters has been linked to slower language development, poorer performance in school and lower self-esteem. And because social skills are dependent on language, previous studies have found that even slight hearing loss in elementary and high school students can result in progressively lower scores on communication tests and greater anxiety.

analyzed data on more than 8,600 adults aged 20 or older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted between 1988 and 1994.

common allergies and heart disease frequently paired up

there was a 2.6-fold increased risk of heart disease with wheezing and a 40 percent increased risk with rhinoconjunctivitis, compared to no allergies. The association was mainly seen in women younger than age of 50.

Although mind-bending drugs such as psilocybin are still used most often by people looking to get high, researchers around the country have begun to explore whether these and other illegal drugs can help treat intractable depression, anxiety, and other mental-health problems.

n the past month alone, studies have been published on the benefits of MDMA (better known as Ecstasy) in people with post-traumatic stress disorder and on the fast-acting antidepressive effects of the club drug ketamine (aka "Special K").

But research into the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs ground to a halt in the early 1970s, after the federal government criminalized LSD and psilocybin -- and after the drugs were eagerly adopted by college students and the hippie counterculture. "These studies had to be shut down because of the cultural reaction,"

People at risk for type 2 diabetes are also more likely to have brain abnormalities associated with Alzheimer's disease, according to a new study from Japan. The study is the latest evidence of a diabetes-dementia link.

The researchers found that men and women in their 60s with higher-than-average levels of blood sugar (glucose) or insulin -- two signs of type 2 diabetes -- are between three and six times more likely to have certain protein deposits in their brains a decade or more later, according to the study, which appears in the journal Neurology.

Alzheimer's disease affects as many as 5 million people in the U.S., and the cause is largely unknown (although genes play a role). About 24 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, and about 90 percent of those have type 2.

Eating some kinds of berries can help your brain stay healthy by helping to clean out toxic material linked to mental decline, including age-related memory loss, a new study shows.

Experts have long known that as the body ages it suffers “oxidative damage” and is less likely to be able to protect itself against cancer, heart disease and age-related mental decline.

But Poulose and his colleague found that strawberries, blueberries and acai berries activate brain cells called microglia. These cells, according to the ACS, act as the brain’s “housekeeper.” In a process called autophagy, they clean out “biochemical debris that would otherwise interfere with brain function.”

Drinking wine in moderate amounts may reduce the risk of decline in thinking skills in some people and may even protect against dementia, a new study shows.

women who reported drinking wine at least four times over a two-week period were at reduced risk of scoring poorly on the tests, compared with women who had less than one drink during the period. In addition, women who didn't drink any alcohol scored lowest on the tests. The average age of people in the study was 58, and none had suffered a stroke.

Surveys by Mental Health America and other researchers have found that people affected by the lousy economy have a higher risk for mental illness, especially such conditions as depression and anxiety.

The Mental Health America survey found that unemployed people were four times as likely as people with jobs to report symptoms consistent with severe mental illness.But the harmful mental effects of the economy aren't limited to the unemployed. People whose jobs were changed by the economic downturn -- those who went through involuntary job changes or had their hours or pay cut at work -- were twice as likely to have symptoms consistent with severe mental illness, the survey found.It also found that unemployed people were four times more likely to think of harming themselves and twice as likely to report substance or alcohol abuse or worries about their mental health.

At a time when they need professional help more than ever, many people have less access to it, the survey also revealed. About half of the survey participants who were unemployed said they had difficulty obtaining health care. Of those who hadn't spoken to a doctor about their mental health concerns, 42% said it was because the care was too expensive or they didn't have insurance to cover it.

Stress caused by social situations, such as giving a speech or going to a job interview, can affect some people's immune system in ways that harm their health, researchers have found.The study included 124 volunteers who were purposely put into awkward social situations. Those who exhibited greater neural sensitivity to social rejection also had greater increases in inflammatory activity when exposed to social stress.

The findings provide "further evidence of how closely our mind and body are connected. We have known for a long time that social stress can 'get under the skin' to increase risk for disease, but it's been unclear exactly how these effects occur. To our knowledge, this study is the first to identify the neurocognitive pathways that might be involved in inflammatory responses to acute social stress," Slavich said.