OMG Digital Magazine July 23rd, 2015 - Vol 4 Issue 168 | Page 33

What

worry
really does

to your BRAIN
BY LAURA HILGERS

Reeling from the breakup of her marriage, Laura
Hilgers had a lot on her mind. Then she started
worrying about what all that worrying was doing to
her brain.
If emotional stress could be measured on the Richter scale,
mine would be hovering around 9.0—and it’s been that
way since the day my husband of 23 years announced he
wanted a divorce. I was blindsided by the news; if there had
been warning signs, I’d missed them completely. A year
and a half later, as we signed the divorce papers, I was still
in shock.
So when I tuned in to NPR several months ago while driving
home from my divorce attorney’s office, the last thing
I wanted to hear about was a study linking midlife stress
to dementia. The researchers had tracked 800 women in
Gothenburg, Sweden, from 1968 to 2005, looking at how
stress affected their health pre- and postmenopause.
Over the course of the study, they uncovered a surprising
finding: The women who reported major stressors—such
as divorce, the death of a spouse, or a demotion or job
loss—between ages 38 and 54 had a 21 percent increased
risk of Alzheimer’s and a 15 percent increased risk of
developing any kind of dementia. The more stressors, the
higher the risk.

My first thought was, They have stress in
Sweden?
My second thought: Oh, great. My marriage
blows up, and now I have to worry about
losing my mind?
My third thought: At least I’ll be in good
company.
The fact is, I can’t name a single person who hasn’t been
through something awful in midlife. Among my friends,
several have weathered ugly divorces or serious marital
troubles, others are dealing with their spouse’s or children’s
addiction issues, and a few have lost their jobs. Even though
the study focused specifically on middle age, stress at any
stage of life may impact our Alzheimer’s risk, says Maria
Norton, PhD, an associate professor at Utah State University
and one of the study’s authors. And women might not be
the only ones affected: Early data from a 19-year study on
men and women suggests that the link between stress and
dementia may be similar for both sexes. Does this mean
that our brains take a hit with every major life shakeup?
To find out, I got in touch with Robert Sapolsky, PhD, a
neuroscientist at Stanford and the author of Why Zebras
Don’t Get Ulcers, which explores the effects of long-term
stress on the body and brain. Sapolsky explained that when
we’re stressed, two areas of the brain crucial to learning
and memory, the hippocampus and frontal cortex, are
flooded with hormones called glucocorticoids, which help
our body prioritize what’s most important in a crisis. These
hormones maximize our strength and energy—in case we
need to flee a predator, for example—while temporarily

shutting down less essential functions, such as maintaining
connections between neurons in our brain. (You don’t
want to spend precious mental energy consolidating
memories when you’re trying to outrun a saber-toothed
tiger.) But chronic stress has us releasing glucocorticoids
nonstop. “As a result, the hippocampus and frontal cortex
continually back-burner their housekeeping duties of
cleaning up connections between neurons,” says Sapolsky.
Over time, that can cause these neurons to function poorly,
potentially leaving us vulnerable to cognitive decline.
The big question—and one Rajita Sinha, PhD, a professor
of psychiatry and neurobiology and director of the Yale
Stress Center, gets a lot—is whether the brain can bounce
back after periods of chronic stress. “Everyone wants to
know if they can recover from the damage,” says Sinha.
“And actually, we think they can, but