Chronic psychological stress and the regulation of pro-inflammatory cytokines: a glucocorticoid-resistance model.

By Gregory E. Miller, Sheldon Cohen, A. Ritchey. Health Psychology, 2002

991 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined whether chronic stress impairs the immune system's capacity to respond to hormonal signals that terminate inflammation. Fifty healthy adults were studied; half were parents of cancer patients, and half were parents of healthy children. Parents of cancer patients reported more psychological distress than parents of healthy children. They also had flatter diurnal slopes of cortisol secretion, primarily because of reduced output during the morning hours. There was also evidence that chronic stress impaired the immune system's response to anti-inflammatory signals: The capacity of a synthetic glucocorticoid hormone to suppress in vitro production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 was diminished among parents of cancer patients. Findings suggest a novel pathway by which chronic stress might alter the course of inflammatory disease.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Biological Psychiatry, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca453375a6f97504f42418577d6d52b1c839a03e

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Citations in the corpus

The effects of acute psychological stress on circulating and stimulated inflammatory markers: A systematic review and meta-analysis (2017, background): “…(HPA) axis leading to the release of cortisol (Papanicolau, Wilder, Manolagas, Chrousos, 1998), which functions via glucocorticoid receptors on immune cells to inhibit production of proinflammatory cytokines and downregulate inflammation (Miller et al., 2002; Eisenberger & Cole, 2012).”
Benefit Finding and Physical Health: Positive Psychological Changes and Enhanced Allostasis (2008, background): “For example, chronic stress may lead to a decrease or downregulation of glucocorticoid receptors on immune cells, reducing the sensitivity of immune cells to the anti-inflammatory effects of glucocorticoids and increasing proinflammatory cytokine production (Miller, Cohen, & Ritchey, 2002).”
Inflammatory Cytokines in Depression: Neurobiological Mechanisms and Therapeutic Implications (2013, background): “Adiposity has been suggested as a link between depression, increased inflammatory markers, and increased risk of coronary heart disease (Miller et al., 2002b, Miller et al., 2003), and the cytokines released from adipose tissue may also affect the brain and behavior.”
Social buffering: relief from stress and anxiety (2006, background): “It has been reported that diseases that respond to peripheral cortisol levels, such as cancer (Turner-Cobb et al. 2000; Spiegel & Sephton 2001; Miller et al. 2002), asthma (Buske-Kirschbaum et al. 2003) and infections (Cohen et al. 1997; Leserman et al. 2000; van Reenen et al. 2000) heal better in…”
Health psychology: developing biologically plausible models linking the social world and physical health. (2009, background): “As a result, the immune system’s ability to respond to anti-inflammatory signals from these hormones would be reduced, and inflammatory processes would flourish (Miller et al. 2002a).”
Understanding the somatic consequences of depression: biological mechanisms and the role of depression symptom profile (2013, background): “Although the HPA-axis in normal situations tempers inflammatory reactions, prolonged hyperactivity could result in blunted anti-inflammatory responses to glucocorticoids resulting in increased inflammation [132,133].”
Burnout and risk of cardiovascular disease: evidence, possible causal paths, and promising research directions. (2006, background): “tance was also observed in chronic psychological stress (Bauer et al., 2000; Miller et al., 2002).”
Social Support and Health: A Review of Physiological Processes Potentially Underlying Links to Disease Outcomes (2006, background): “However, psychosocial processes such as chronic stress can also lead to a state of glucocorticoid resistance (Miller et al., 2002; Hawkley et al., in press).”
Stress and health: psychological, behavioral, and biological determinants. (2005, background): “Miller et al. (2002) proposed the glucocorticoid-resistance model to account for this deficit in proinflammatory cytokine regulation.”
Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk (2012, background): “Evidence for GCR in response to chronic stress has been found in parents of children with cancer (10), spouses of brain-cancer patients (11) and in persons reporting high levels of loneliness (5).”
Positive health: connecting well-being with biology. (2004, background): “Sleep has also been shown to play a mediating role in the link between socio-economic status and health (Moore et al. 2002), and among healthy older adults, those with longer sleep latencies and poorer sleep efficiency were at greater risk of death than those with shorter latencies and better sleep…”