Do you have Stressheimer’s?
Whether you’re worried about your health care (that’s 78 percent of you), your finances (30 percent say it’s a constant anxiety, while 40 percent go sleepless because of money woes) or your basic needs (40 percent of you believe that you’re being underpaid in your jobs), you’re a candidate for Stressheimer’s — memory problems triggered by relentless anxiety.
According to researchers from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, among their study participants 70 and older, every 5-point increase in a person’s perceived stress score boosted the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment by 30 percent! Folks who had the very highest estimation of their daily stress levels were 250 percent more likely to suffer from cognition problems than lesser-stressed folks. But Stressheimer’s doesn’t just affect older folks. In a 2007 study published in Acta Psychologica, researchers found that among
70 male students, acute psychosocial stress prevented them from remembering words they were tasked with memorizing when tested five weeks later. Peers not subject to acute stress recalled the words much more frequently. Even more interesting, an animal study showed that early-life stress translates to late-in-life cognition problems. That may be because it causes structural changes in the brain’s frontal cortex and in the neurons themselves, when they’re ove-exposed to stress hormones.
A 2012 study by researchers from Dr. Oz’s Columbia University Medical Center found that chronic stress affects type 2 ryanodine receptors in the hippocampus, the brain region that plays a central role in learning and memory. These receptors are channels that regulate the calcium levels in neurons, which cells need to function and survive.
Turns out, memory is also affected by gender.