Central role of the brain in stress and adaptation: Links to socioeconomic status, health, and disease

By Bruce S. McEwen, Peter J. Gianaros. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2010

1,526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The brain is the key organ of stress reactivity, coping, and recovery processes. Within the brain, a distributed neural circuitry determines what is threatening and thus stressful to the individual. Instrumental brain systems of this circuitry include the hippocampus, amygdala, and areas of the prefrontal cortex. Together, these systems regulate physiological and behavioral stress processes, which can be adaptive in the short‐term and maladaptive in the long‐term. Importantly, such stress processes arise from bidirectional patterns of communication between the brain and the autonomic, cardiovascular, and immune systems via neural and endocrine mechanisms underpinning cognition, experience, and behavior. In one respect, these bidirectional stress mechanisms are protective in that they promote short‐term adaptation (allostasis). In another respect, however, these stress mechanisms can lead to a long‐term dysregulation of allostasis in that they promote maladaptive wear‐and‐tear on the body and brain under chronically stressful conditions (allostatic load), compromising stress resiliency and health. This review focuses specifically on the links between stress‐related processes embedded within the social environment and embodied within the brain, which is viewed as the central mediator and target of allostasis and allostatic load.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd4bc228ebc07b58a24bd10e9528172c9c635ccf

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Citations in the corpus

The social determinants of health: coming of age. (2011, background): “Recent evidence implicates chronic stress in the causal pathways linking multiple upstream social determinants with health, through neuroendocrine, inflammatory, immune, and/or vascular mechanisms (71, 108).”
The Lifelong Effects of Early Childhood Adversity and Toxic Stress (2012, background): “As described in the previous section, stress-induced changes in the architecture of different regions of the developing brain (eg, amygdala, hippocampus, and PFC) can have potentially permanent effects on a range of important functions, such as regulating stress physiology, learning new skills, and ”
Beyond Cumulative Risk: A Dimensional Approach to Childhood Adversity (2016, background): “The concept of allostatic load has been reviewed extensively elsewhere (McEwen, 2012; McEwen & Gianaros, 2010).”
Stress- and Allostasis-Induced Brain Plasticity (2011, positive): “Epidemiological studies have associated measures of social integration with lifespan, trajectories of cognitive aging and risk for dementia, severity of subclinical cardiovascular disease, risk for stroke, survival times in patients with cardiovascular disease, and the recurrence of cancer (12, 58).”
Childhood Poverty, Chronic Stress, Self-Regulation, and Coping (2013, background): “A more useful indicator of chronic stress, allostatic load (McEwen & Gianaros, 2010; Seeman, Epel, Gruenewald, Karlamangla, & McEwen, 2010), reflects chronic wear and tear on the body caused by the mobilization of multiple systems as they respond to changing environmental demands.”
From Stress to Inflammation and Major Depressive Disorder: A Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression (2014, positive): “Because the brain plays a critical role in appraising stressors, as well as in modulating immune system reactivity to physical and social threat (McEwen & Gianaros, 2010; Pavlov & Tracey, 2004; Sternberg, 2006), it might be expected that individual differences exist in the extent to which people…”
Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal and hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axes: sex differences in regulation of stress responsivity (2017, background): “These responses are known to be adaptive and have effects that influence future HPA axis responses (McEwen & Gianaros, 2010).”
Cumulative risk and child development. (2013, background): “…dl y. aroused considerable interest because of its links to both concurrent and prospective health outcomes, including mortality (McEwen, 1998; McEwen & Gianaros, 2010) as well as a potent explanatory variable for psychological disturbances in emotions and cognition (Ganzel, Morris, &…”
Early-Life Adversity and Physical and Emotional Health across the Lifespan: A Neuro-Immune Network Hypothesis (2015, background): “To understand the plethora of health problems associated with childhood adversity, the field needs a second generation of research that recognizes the multidirectional transactions among these systems (10).”