Stress, hormones and disease

Physiology & Behavior
Benjamin H Natelson

Abstract

My postdoctoral training under Dr. Gerard Smith began me on a lifetime of investigation on the role of stress, hormones, and disease. The first set of experiments asked what hormone, if any, best reflected the range of aroused behaviors. We found that catecholamines performed substantially better than glucocorticoids did, despite the belief that glucocorticoids were sensitive indices of stress. But we also learned that hormones themselves were nowhere near as good in monitoring stress than motor behaviors were. In a second set of experiments, we tried to understand how stress affected medical disease. We learned that stress can produce disease in a healthy organism but has its most profound effects when disease already exists. Finally, in the early 1990s, I shifted my focus on stress and disease to a broader problem in behavioral medicine, namely, medically unexplained fatigue and pain. Among the studies we have done investigating these disorders, we looked specifically at veterans of the first Gulf War--many of whom developed problems with severe fatigue. A critical question in the literature asked if unexplained fatigue was simply a physical component of concurrent posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a large epidemiologi...Continue Reading

References

Jan 1, 1988·Physiology & Behavior·B H NatelsonW N Tapp
Oct 1, 1971·Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology·J M Weiss
Oct 1, 1984·Behavioral Neuroscience·B H NatelsonW N Tapp
Jun 1, 1981·Physiology & Behavior·B H NatelsonB E Levin
Jul 1, 1996·Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine·Q ChangR S Conway
Sep 29, 1999·Archives of Environmental Health·H M KipenB H Natelson
Aug 16, 2003·The American Journal of the Medical Sciences·Arnold PeckermanBenjamin H Natelson
Sep 26, 2003·Psychosomatic Medicine·Arnold PeckermanBenjamin H Natelson

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Citations

Mar 2, 2013·Sleep·Mayumi MachidaLarry D Sanford
Nov 23, 2013·Behavioral Medicine·Rabia KhalailaJamal Zidan
Jul 13, 2011·Menopause : the Journal of the North American Menopause Society·Sonia L Davison

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Related Concepts

Related Feeds

Anxiety Disorders

Discover the latest research on anxiety disorders including agoraphobia, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder here.