Stress helps you meet your daily challenges and motivates you to reach your goals, ultimately making you a smarter, happier, and healthier person. However, when you are stressed, what body reactions or clinical manifestations do you often experience? After studying the endocrine system and the stress response, can you explain how these clinical manifestations occur?
The conditions experienced by each person differ in the stressors that might trigger something within their body. Some are just innately sensitive, while others are impervious. This gives rise to different coping mechanism, done to combat and alleviate stress.
Just a brief background to help support my explanation about the body reactions or clinical manifestations that I experience in times of stress. The father's side of my family is asthmatic and unfortunately, I inherited it. The childhood asthma that I experienced mainly stems from playtime sessions that leave me exposed to dust (indoors), and air pollutants such as cigarette smoke when outdoors.
During an asthma attack, the muscle wall contracts and the lining of the airways becomes swollen and inflamed. These changes cause a narrowing of the airways which is further aggravated by an increase in secretions from the mucus membrane, which may actually block the smaller airways. All these give rise to an obstruction to airflow. This leads to a significant increase in the effort needed to move air in and out of the lungs, giving rise to wheezing and breathlessness.
As I became a teen, the symptoms of my asthma became dormant up until my 9th grade since being at a higher level comes with its own set of negatives due to an overload of work, I discovered that during my times of stress it will be followed by an asthma attack. This clinical manifestation is called stress-induced asthma. This is further elaborated in an 18-month prospective study of children with asthma, the experience of an acute negative life event (e.g., death of a close family member) increased the risk of a subsequent asthma attack by nearly 2-fold (Sandberg et al., 2000).
Sources:
Chen, E., & Miller, G. E. (2007). Stress and inflammation in exacerbations of asthma. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 21(8), 993–999. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2007.03.009
Your lungs - an asthma attack. (2021, July 19). HSE. Retrieved October 13, 2022, from https://www.hse.gov.uk/asthma/lungs.htm