Stress is one of the epidemics of our time. Both physical factors—extreme temperatures, lack of sleep, overexertion, or poor posture—and emotional and mental factors can cause us to experience stress. Caring for a sick relative, unemployment, challenges at work, or the social demands of a certain lifestyle all contribute to this state, which is often considered a voluntary condition that can be easily resolved. But the truth is that stress is a pathology that can be serious.
Stress can arise naturally when facing certain situations; in fact, it is a mechanism that is immediately triggered when we encounter dangerous situations. The problem arises when we experience everyday situations not as negative episodes that we can cope with, but as insurmountable and prolonged dangerous situations.
What symptoms does stress cause in our bodies? We find physical symptoms such as headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, intestinal problems, and sleep problems. Mood and behavior are also affected, with symptoms of depression and anxiety, lack of motivation, irritability, alcohol abuse or irregular eating habits, social withdrawal, or a sedentary lifestyle.
Furthermore, stress has been linked to premature aging and the onset of autoimmune diseases. Telomeres are strands of DNA that progressively shorten with cell division, and their length determines our biological age. When telomeres shorten excessively in relation to chronological age, we are experiencing premature aging. Stress is one of the factors that influence this rapid shortening.
The "malfunctioning" of the immune system has also been linked to stress. In a study conducted on mice, it was found that when subjected to increased stress, the mice released higher levels of glucocorticoids, which caused the immune system to malfunction.
When the stress system is activated, it affects the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. As published by the Ibero-American Society for Scientific Information (SSI), there is a relationship between stress and reduced immune function due to a lower proliferative response of lymphocytes to mitogens, a decrease in IgM, and a decrease in the humoral response to immunization.
Although the direct mechanism by which stress contributes to the onset of an autoimmune disease is unknown, clinical practice tells us that a large proportion of patients with an autoimmune disease have experienced a stressful situation or have lived in this state for the medium or long term.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association took as a reference three control groups with a population of more than 120,000 people: those suffering from stress and other anxiety disorders, their siblings without stress, and a population group without anxiety-related disorders. Over a ten-year period, they recorded diagnoses of autoimmune diseases and found that people suffering from stress had a 36 percent higher risk of developing such diseases, a figure that rose to 46 percent in the case of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Genetic, emotional, and environmental factors combine to give rise to autoimmune diseases, but their trigger may be a viral infection, hormonal factors, or peaks of stress, among other things. Scientific studies have not found a cause for these types of diseases, which have a high prevalence: they affect 4 percent of the female population and 2.7 percent of the male population in Spain. In addition, in 8 percent of cases, patients have two types of autoimmune diseases.
At Biosalud Day Hospital, we develop treatments that address the cause of the disease, rather than just the symptoms. While it is important to understand and reduce the manifestations of the disease in order to improve patients' quality of life, if we only focus on those symptoms, we cannot achieve a sustainable recovery over time.
Biological Medicine is based on principles that consider all factors that influence health, both physical and emotional, and uses the necessary therapies to activate the body's own healing powers.
In autoimmune diseases, although it is difficult to act on genetic factors, it is possible to act on lifestyle and environmental factors that have contributed to the onset of the disease. What we aim to achieve with our personalized treatments is to restore the immune system's tolerance to normalcy so that it does not see the body's own tissues as foreign. For this reason, we do not advocate treatments with immunosuppressants, which weaken the immune system to reduce the level of the disease, causing it to lose its ability to defend the body against any other attack.
