Sreemoyee Chatterjee
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Excessive stress may lead to poor memory © Shutterstock
Did you know that increased level of stressnot just affects your physical health but also leads your brain to shrink in size? That is what a recent study has shown. Apart from negatively impacting your memory and your body, it also reduces your brain size. The study has been published in Journal of Neurology and conducted by the researchers at Harvard Medical School, National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Boston University of Medicine , University of California, Davis and UT Health San Antonio and all of the researchers have related stress to changes in brain.
The researchers involved a group of participants, of average age 48 and healthy and measured Cortisol levels in all of them and co-related these MRI scans of their brains and performance on memory and cognition tests, reveals a recent media report. Cortisol is a hormone that is released when you are at stress and this plays an important role in response to stressor, say experts.
Interestingly, it was found that people with higher levels of Cortisol had reduced volume of occipital and frontal lobes of brain. Not just that, certain changes in their brain structure pointed out bat poor connectivity. "They had difficulty copying a pattern or recalling a story," the study stated.
In our quest to understand cognitive ageing, one of the factors attracting significant interest and concern is the increasing stress of modern life," the official statement about the study said, according to the media report. The statement further added: "The faster pace of life today probably means more stress, and when we are stressed, Cortisol levels increase because that is our fight-or-flight response."