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How could a single, nonpharmacological intervention help patients deal with disorders ranging from high blood pressure, to pain syndromes, to infertility, to rheumatoid arthritis? That question may have been answered by a study finding that eliciting the relaxation response - a physiologic state of deep rest - influences the activation patterns of genes associated with the body’s response to stress. The collaborative investigation by members of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Genomics Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) appears in the open-access journal PLoS One.
"For hundreds of years Western medicine has looked at mind and body as totally separate entities, to the point where saying something ‘is all in your head’ implied that it was imaginary," says Herbert Benson, MD, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute and co-senior author of the PloS One report. "Now we’ve found how changing the activity of the mind can alter the way basic genetic instructions are implemented."
Towia Libermann, PhD, director of the BIDMC Genomics Center and the report’s co-senior author, adds, "This is the first comprehensive study of how the mind can affect gene expression, linking what has been looked on as a ’soft’ science with the ‘hard’ science of genomics. It is also important because of its focus on gene expression in healthy individuals, rather than in disease states."
More than 35 years ago Benson first described the relaxation response, which can be elicited by practices including meditation, deep breathing and prayer; and his team has pioneered the field of mind/body medicine. Over the years, studies in many peer-reviewed journals documented how the relaxation response not only alleviates symptoms of psychological disorders such as anxiety but also affects physiologic factors such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen consumption and brain activity. While it became evident that the relaxation response was the opposite of the well documented fight-or-flight response, the mechanism underlying these effects was still unknown.
The current study was designed to investigate if changes in gene expression - whether specific genes are activated or repressed - were behind the wide-ranging effects of the relaxation response. The first phase compared gene expression patterns of 19 long-term practitioners of different relaxation response techniques with those of 19 individuals who had never engaged in such practices. Those control participants then went through an 8-week training program to investigate whether initiating relaxation response practice would change gene expression over time.
Both phases of the study indicated that the relaxation response alters the expression of genes involved with processes such as inflammation, programmed cell death and how the body handles free radicals - molecules produced by normal metabolism that, if not appropriately neutralized, can damage cells and tissues. To validate those results, both phases were repeated in 6 different relaxation response practitioners and 5 non-practitioners, resulting in significantly similar changes in gene expression.
Jeffery Dusek, PhD, co-lead author of the study notes, "Changes in the activation of these same genes have previously been seen in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder; but the relaxation-response-associated changes were the opposite of stress-associated changes and were much more pronounced in the long-term practitioners." Formerly with the Benson-Henry Institute, Dusek is now at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.
Benson explains, "People have been using these culturally determined mind/body techniques for millenia. We found that no matter which particular technique is used - different forms of meditation and yoga, breath focus, or repetitive prayer - the mechanism involved is the same. Now we need to see if similar changes occur in patients who use the relaxation response to help treat stress-related disorders, and those studies are underway now."
Libermann notes that the sensitive genomic analyses conducted in this study are at the cutting edge of efforts to unravel the genetic aspects of complex disorders. "There are a lot of differences in gene expression between one healthy person and another, so it is challenging to analyze the kinds of subtle changes we are seeing and identify what changes are significant and what are just background noise. Our approach uses the latest bioinformatics tools to identify potential gene functions, generating hypotheses that can then be tested in laboratory or clinical studies."
Benson is the Mind/Body Medical Institute Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where Libermann is an associate professor of Medicine. Generic amoxil pills no prescription Hasan Otu, PhD, of BIDMC Genomics Center is co-lead author of the PloS One study. Additional co-authors are Ann Wohlhueter, Benson-Henry Institute; and Manoj Bhasin, PhD, Luiz Zerbini, PhD, and Marie Joseph, BIDMC. The study was supported by grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Massachusetts General Hospital, established in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $500 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a patient care, teaching and research affiliate of Harvard Medical School and consistently ranks in the top four in National Institutes of Health funding among independent hospitals nationwide. BIDMC is a clinical partner of the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. BIDMC is the official hospital of the Boston Red Sox.
Massachusetts General Hospital
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The negative effects of stress on cognitive functioning appear to be amplified by a genetic variation associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a new federally funded study has found. Buy soma without prescription The genetic variation may, in effect, accelerate the development of age-related cognitive decline by as much as eight years.
Researchers from the Baltimore Memory Study report in The American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP), the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, that a high level of the stress hormone cortisol in study participants aged 50 to 70 years was associated with worsened cognitive abilities. The researchers also found that the effect was greater among those with a common form of the gene for apolipoprotein E (APOE), which has been shown to increase the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
This gene-environment interaction is reported by Brian Lee, M.H.S., Brian Schwartz, M.D., and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. The group’s findings will be presented online on July 1 under AJP in Advance .
The effect appears to increase as the number of copies of a specific APOE gene in the individual increases. Everyone inherits two versions of the APOE gene, known as alleles - one from each parent. The most common APOE alleles are epsilon-2, -3, and -4. Having at least one epsilon-4 allele increases an individual’s risk of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Individuals with two copies of the esiplon-4 version of the gene are particularly susceptible to the damaging effects of cortisol in the brain.
"Our findings indicate that the APOE epsilon-4 allele may increase vulnerability of the aging brain to elevated cortisol levels," said lead author Lee, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "While our results remain to be replicated, the observed cortisol-APOE interaction is intriguing since both cortisol and APOE have been implicated in cognitive decline associated with aging as well as in Alzheimer’s disease."
The effects on cognitive functioning extended to six of the seven areas that were studied: language, eye-hand coordination, executive functioning, verbal memory/learning, visual memory, and ability to copy a complex visual design.
The deficits are similar in magnitude to those seen with advancing age. The authors estimated the equivalent years of increased age, represented by the poorer cognition of the study participants with high cortisol and the epsilon-4 form of the APOE gene. For language ability, the lower scores of people with high cortisol levels and one epsilon-4 copy were comparable to an age increase of eight years. For those with two epsilon-4 copies, the comparable age increase was even larger.
The study was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health Division of Research Resources.
Reference
Lee BK, Glass TA, Wand GS, McAtee MJ, Bandeen-Roche K, Bolla KI, Schwartz BS: Apolipoprotein E Genotype, Cortisol and Cognitive Function in Community-Dwelling Older Adults. Am J Psychiatry (published online July 1, 2008; doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07091532)
About the American Journal of Psychiatry
The American Journal of Psychiatry is the official journal of the American Psychiatric Association. Statements in this press release or the articles in the Journal are not official policy statements of the American Psychiatric Association. AJP in Advance is a regular online feature where original research articles accepted for publication in The American Journal of Psychiatry are posted online in advance of their appearance in print.
About the American Psychiatric Association
The American Psychiatric Association is a national medical specialty society whose more than 38,000 physician members specialize in diagnosis, treatment, prevention and research of mental illnesses including substance use disorders. Visit the APA at and
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Small children who grow up in a family where the mother has psychological distress, the family is exposed to stress or is lacking social support, are at higher risk of developing anxious and depressive symptoms in early adolescence. Girls are more vulnerable than boys, and very timid or short-tempered children are more vulnerable than others to develop emotional problems. This is shown in a new doctorate study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH).
Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental problems for children and adolescents.
Contributing factors to the development of symptoms of anxiety and depression while growing up is the key focus in the doctorate project by Evalill Karevold at the NIPH.
10-20% of all children and young people will, in the course of growing up, display enough symptoms of anxiety and depression to qualify for a diagnosis.
Environmental factors play an important role
Karevold has followed more than 900 families from when the children were 18 months old through to adolescence (data from the NIPH’s TOPP-study). The findings are based on maternal and child report of the child’s symptoms of anxiety and depression, plus reports from the mother about risk and protective factors in the family environment.
Generic lasix pills no prescription A main finding highlights the importance of environmental factors for families with children less than 5 years of age. Maternal distress symptoms, family stress and lack of social support in their children’s growing-up environment in pre-school age leads to an increase in anxiety and depression symptoms when these children reach 12-13 years old.
In addition, the results show that girls are more likely to develop emotional problems at 12-13 years of age than boys.
"Research indicates that girls tend to churn over problems and events more than boys. In addition, early puberty in girls is thought to make them extra vulnerable to developing depressive symptoms," says Evalill Karevold.
Timid children have a greater risk for anxiety and depression
Another discovery shows that shy children generally have a higher risk of developing anxiety and depression than children who are not shy. If timid boys are also very inactive, the risk of developing emotional difficulties is almost three times as high compared with shy boys with a high level of activity. This does not seem to be the case for girls.
The results indicate that there can be two central developmental paths to emotional problems in early adolescence. One path goes through the child’s temperament, especially temperamental emotionality (tendency to react quickly and intensely). A different course goes through the environmental factors that are present when the children are at pre-school age.
"It is important to be aware of families who are struggling with multiple burdens, and who have little support or network around them when the children are young. Having pre-school aged children is believed to be a particularly vulnerable period to be exposed to maternal symptoms, so it is especially important to identify and help mothers who are struggling with anxiety and depression as early as possible. Health clinics can play a central role in spotting families who are struggling, and a lot more emphasis should be made to build up mental health expertise here," says Karevold.
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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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Source: Media contact
Norwegian Institute of Public Health
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New research from the US suggests that women who are stressed during pregnancy, for example struggling with financial or relationship issues,
are more likely to have babies with immune-related problems such as allergies and asthma.
The research is the work of
scientists from Harvard Medical School, Boston, and other colleagues, and was presented at a recent meeting of the
American Thoracic Society in Toronto, Canada, on Sunday.
Animal studies have already shown that the immune system of offspring is more sensitive to allergens when mothers are stressed when
pregnant.
In this study on human subjects, the researchers said their results suggested the same is probably true of humans: the stress experienced by a
pregnant mother may translate into long term health problems for her child.
Co-author Dr Rosalind Wright, of Harvard Medical School said in a prepared statement reported by Reuters that:
"This research adds to a growing body of evidence that links maternal stress such as that precipitated by financial problems or relationship issues to
changes in children’s developing immune systems, even during pregnancy."
According to the Washington Post, Wright, who is also an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical
School, added that:
"Moms who had elevated levels of stress had children who seemed to be more reactive to allergens, even when exposed to low levels of
allergens."
Dr Junette Peters, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School, said perhaps stress made women more susceptible to allergens by
making their "cells more permeable", and they pass this on to their offspring.
To carry out their study, Wright, Peters and colleagues examined the IgE level of umbilical cord blood taken during the birth of 387 babies in
Boston.
Buy generic lasix IgE stands for immunoglobulin E, an antibody that indicates how sensitive the immune system is to allergens such as dust mites.
The mothers completed surveys about their stress exposure in different areas. Financial pressure, home pressure, safety in the community,
problems in relationships, and medical issues, were the most frequently mentioned, said the Washington Post. The dust mite levels in their homes
was also assessed.
The researchers found that the mothers who were under the most stress (measured in terms of the number of problem domains reported) while
pregnant gave birth to babies with high levels of IgE in their cord blood, even though the level of dust mites in their home environment was
low.
This suggested that the stress of the mother was contributing to the higher IgE sensitivity of the baby. This relationship was still significant after the
researchers took into account the mother’s class, race, education and smoking history, reported Reuters.
Wright said it was as though stress itself acted like a social pollutant that influenced the body’s immune response.
The results from this study seem to reinforce the findings from Dr Andrea Danese and colleagues at the University of London, who found adults who
were treated badly in childhood, for instance they had been rejected by their mothers or sexually abused, had twice the levels of inflammation
markers like C-reactive protein and fibrinogen in their blood compared to those that had not. Such inflammatory markers can increase a person’s risk
of developing diabetes and heart disease.
Danese presented his research results at a conference in Chicago last week, said Reuters, who reported his comments:
"Stress in childhood may modify developmental trajectories and have a long-term effect on disease risk," said Danese, who suggested that being
mistreated as a child could reduce an adult’s ability to respond to stress by reducing the action of glucocorticoid inflammation inhibitors, which can
result in depresson and other mental illnesses.
Sources: Reuters, Washington Post.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today
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Moving house or the separation of parents can significantly increase the risk of children developing allergies later on. These are the results from a long-term study correlating life-style, immune system development and allergies, led by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen and the "Institut f??r Umweltmedizinische Forschung" (IUF) in Duesseldorf. Generic ultram pills no prescription The researchers had examined blood samples taken from 234 six-year old children and discovered increased blood concentrations of the stress-related peptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) in connection with moving house or the separation of parents. The neuropeptide VIP could take on a mediator role between stress events in life and the regulation of immune responses, researchers write in the scientific journal Pediatric Allergy and Immunology. The fact that stress events can have an influence on the development of allergies has been known for a while. The mechanisms behind this however remained unexplained for a long time. In the study that has now been published, stress events were investigated for the first time during early childhood within a large epidemiological study using immune and stress markers.
Stress events during childhood are increasingly suspected of playing a role in the later development of asthma, allergic skin disorders, or allergic sensitisations. Dramatic life events like the death of a family member, serious illnesses of a family member or the separation of parents, but also harmless events like for example moving house are suspected of increasing the risk of allergies for the children affected. The immune system obviously plays a mediator role between stress on the one hand and allergies on the other. Since these mechanisms had hardly been understood before, researchers attempted to identify stress-related factors showing an influence on the immune system, in the context of an epidemiological study (LISA). At the same time as the blood tests, researchers together with colleagues from the Institute for Social Medicine at the University of L??beck also analysed the most diverse social factors in the children’s environment, in order to find out which factors are causing stress-related regulation deficiencies of the immune system. With children, whose parents had separated over the last year, researchers found increased blood concentrations of the neuropeptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) as well as an increased concentration of immune markers, which are related to the occurrence of allergic reactions, like for example the cytokine IL-4. By comparison, serious diseases or the death of close relatives led to no remarkable changes. Likewise, the unemployment of parents was not associated with increased concentrations of the stress-related peptides in the children’s blood. As tragic as these events are, they are obviously however of less significance for the stress reactions of children than for example a separation or the divorce of parents, UFZ researchers have concluded. As was already shown in an earlier publication from the same study, increased concentrations of the stress peptide VIP can also be proven in the blood of children after moving house (similar to the separation of parents). Preceding investigations in LISA showed that there is a relationship between an increased concentration of the neuropeptide VIP and allergic sensitisations among six-year old children. Even if the results were to be interpreted carefully, because of the comparatively small number of children affected, they nevertheless provide valuable indications as to what exactly happens to the body through stress.
The investigations are based on data from 6-year old children from the LISA study. LISA stands for "Lifestyle - Immune System - Allergy" and investigates the influences of life-styles on the immune system development in early childhood and the emergence of allergies. In addition to the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Helmholtz Zentrum M??nchen, the German Research Center for Environmental Health, and the "Institut f??r Umweltmedizinische Forschung" (IUF) in Duesseldorf, other universities and clinics are also participating partners, including the Municipal Hospital "St. Georg" in Leipzig. For the LISA study over 3000 newborn children in the cities of Munich, Leipzig, Wesel and Bad Honnef were recruited between the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1999. Parents were repeatedly asked about various lifestyle-reloated factors and disease outcomes. Furthermore, blood tests were carried out at different times. At the age of six a total of 565 children were examined in Leipzig, and for 234 participants, blood analyses regarding stress and immune parameters were carried out. Over the course of the 6-year study nearly one third of the families living in Leipzig were affected by unemployment. For approximately half of all families, severe illnesses were experienced by close family members. By comparison, cases of death among family members or the separation of parents only affected every sixth or tenth child.
HELMHOLTZ CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH - UFZ
Permoserstra??e 15
D-04318 Leipzig

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