It took strain to discover stress

[Guest guest]

It took strain to discover stress

Whether avoiding predators in the bush or in the office, humans have

always had to cope with stress. But use of the word to mean that

familiar clammy-handed, racing-heart, jumpy-tense feeling was coined

less than a century ago.

by Elena Conis

http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-

esoterica15may15,1,4524562.story?coll=la-headlines-health

Hans Selye was a 19-year-old medical student at the University of

Prague in 1926 when he first asked a simple question: Why do sick

people, no matter their disease, share the same basic symptoms:

sluggishness, weakness and loss of appetite?

The question lingered in the back of his mind and eventually led him

to be the first to describe the body's response to emotionally

difficult events.

A very different strand of study led him there: the search for an

undiscovered sex hormone. While working as a research assistant at

McGill University in 1936, Selye collected ovaries from freshly

killed cows, turned the still-warm organs into liquid extracts and

injected the concoction into female rats.

The rats responded with swollen adrenal glands, bleeding ulcers and

immune glands that shriveled or wasted away. Selye thought he was on

the verge of finding the sought-after sex hormone, and tried to prove

the ovaries were the sole source of the symptoms.

He was wrong. No matter what organ he injected into the rats —

kidney, spleen, pituitary gland — the same symptoms developed.

Moreover, the rats got bleeding ulcers and enlarged or wasted organs

when he did other nasty things, such as injecting them with poison,

making them run hours on treadmills and leaving them on the lab roof

in winter.

So Selye finally reached a different conclusion: The rats, he

decided — borrowing a term from physics — were stressed.

Faced with any out-of-the-ordinary demand — poison, cold, unpleasant

injections or overly-rigorous workouts — the animals' brains signaled

their bodies to haul out defenses: the stress hormones adrenaline

(which boosts heart rate) and cortisol (which suppresses

inflammation). Too much stress, and the body's organs simply started

to wear out.

Selye later conceded that he adopted the wrong term: technically

speaking, while " stress " is a force acting on an object, " strain " is

the change wrought by stress. Had he been fluent in English — or

physics — today's stressed-out workers would call themselves strained-

out.

Selye later showed that constant stress or demands could lead to

heart failure or nervous exhaustion — a finding he extrapolated to

humans.

Selye's theories ultimately inspired scads of studies linking stress

to headaches, fatigue, upset stomachs, insomnia, high blood pressure

and heart disease, depression and anxiety. Stress may even be linked

to cancer or ulcers.

Selye also lectured on stress, expounding on his theories of good and

bad stress, overstress and even under-stress.

You could say he was a poster child for the phenomenon he chronicled:

During his life, he earned three doctorates, published three dozen

books and 1,500 papers, and worked 12-hour days. By his 70s, he had

signs of heart failure and a failing mind.

When he died in 1982, his widow blamed the government for his death:

They caused him too much stress, she said, over his financial

affairs.

[Guest guest]

Hello Gretchen,

As an existential argument this stress vs. strain issue could go on

forever. As an engineer, I know that stress and strain are inexorably

linked by a constant value ascribed to the particular material at hand

and it is called its modulus.

You simply get both at the same time and the engineer doesn't care which

is first as long as the calculations are correct. Colloquially, when you

are stressed your body is under a strain. That's good enough for me and

as Winston Groom wrote, " That's all I'm going to say about that. "

EdM from NH