Stress is bad news — it raises your risk of a host of ailments, including heart disease and cancer. But new evidence is now emerging to show that short bursts of stress could actually be good for your health, warding off infection, helping wounds to heal  and even speeding up the recovery following surgery. There are even suggestions that injections of stress hormones could be used to help people to recover from illness.

Researchers at Stanford University  in the U.S., who have been investigating the beneficial effects of worry and pressure, say such injections might be beneficial for those about to undergo surgery or anyone having a vaccination, in order to ‘turbo charge’ the immune system’s response.

In a key study in 2009, the Stanford team showed that stress helped boost post-surgery recovery. They studied 57 patients who were due to undergo knee surgery to repair damaged cartilage in their joints. Several days before the operation, researchers took blood samples to count the number of immune cells circulating in each patient’s system.

Then, on the morning itself, they repeated the procedure just minutes before a general anaesthetic was given. The researchers were able to identify which patients had the biggest increase in immune system cells as a result of being stressed about the surgery.

For the next year, they tracked them to monitor the speed of  their recovery. The results, which were published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, showed those most stressed — and therefore with the best immune response — recovered more quickly, had less pain, better knee function and greater mobility than those with the weaker stress response.  In their latest research, the Stanford team has managed to pinpoint exactly how stress  boosts the immune system.

The researchers subjected rats to frequent blood tests, which caused them to be stressed. They monitored the changes in blood levels of three hormones (norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol) released when the brain feels the body is under threat. They found that when the rats were stressed, the brain immediately ordered the carefully choreographed release of each hormone in a particular order — norepinephrine first, then epinephrine and finally cortisol.

Each hormone appeared to have a specific role in dispatching disease-fighting immune system cells to different parts of the body to defend against attack.

But the key to these benefits is that a person only suffers from a fleeting moment of stress — chronic, long-term stress has been shown to suppress the immune system by lowering the levels of white blood cells, which form a crucial part of the body’s defences against infections.

© Daily Mail

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