"Bad actors" in the body are emboldened mentally and physically by stress, Mount Sinai study shows
We all deal with some sort of stress, but for some of us, it can be mentally and emotionally debilitating. Aside from mental health issues, stress can also have some serious physical implications as well.
CBS News New York's Cindy Hsu examines all of the factors in the latest report in her Breaking the Stigma series.
"Stress leads to depression, anxiety"
An in-demand customer service engineer for Mount Sinai, Manny Costa recently took part in a study there about how stress impacts the cardiovascular system.
"I feel like just body soreness, getting up, you know, and like mental-like fatigue," Costa said. "I'm under a lot of stress."
Dr. Zahi Fayad, a professor at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine working on the study, says cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the U.S. He said central to the study is how stress impacts that.
"Although we have great tools in terms of treating cardiovascular disease, either with medication, lifestyle, behavior or intervention, it still remains something to worry about," Fayad said. "Stress leads to depression, anxiety and other sequelae that comes out of it. But what has not been very well understood is, is there a link between what happens in your brain and what happens to the rest of the organ?"
"Bad actors" in our body trying to hurt us
Along with scientist and neuroimaging expert David O'Connor, Fayad illustrated the impacts of stress on the brain and cardiovascular system.
"As you get stressed, you activate certain areas in your brain. The immune system gets elevated. Now we have really bad actors in our body. These bad actors are going to trigger a heart attack and a stroke," Fayad said.
O'Connor said for someone who is chronically stressed, there can be a breakdown of communication in parts of the brain, and that can ultimately lead to a narrowing in the cardiovascular system.
"You ideally would have, like, a perfect circle, but you see these kind of indents, and that's basically plaque buildup, right? And so that's one of the key endpoints we have for the cardiovascular disease," O'Connor said. "We saw hot spots in the brain. We saw illumination of your vasculature with inflammation. So we see the fire. We did demonstrate in chronic-stress people that [they] also have a high level of inflammation and high level of cardiovascular disease."
Seeking knowledge on stress impacts
Fayad said he's also shared these important findings with his fellow doctors.
"My cardiology colleagues, they are asking about stress [as] part of their initial visit with the patient," Fayad said.
Costa said the study gave him valuable information on coping techniques.
"After being in the study, I was thinking about stress more, just at least taking deep breaths or just relax and listen to music, whatever it takes, you just do a reset," Costa said.
