Lifetime Traumatic Stress Linked to Heightened Inflammation

Lifetime Traumatic Stress Linked to Heightened Inflammation
By TRACI PEDERSEN
Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on March 31, 2012

The more traumatic stress a person is exposed to over the course of a lifetime, the greater the chances the person has elevated levels of inflammatory markers in his or her bloodstream, say researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and the University of California, San Francisco.

The study is the first to examine the association between cumulative traumatic stress and inflammation. For the study, researchers looked at 979 patients (ages 45 to 90) with stable heart disease and analyzed their exposures to 18 different types of traumatic events, all of which involved either experiencing or watching a direct threat to life or physical integrity.

Next, researchers measured several clinical markers of inflammation that circulate in the bloodstream, and found a direct correlation between lifetime stress exposure and inflammation levels. “This may be significant for people with cardiovascular disease, because we know that heart disease patients with higher levels of inflammation tend to have worse outcomes,” said lead author Aoife O’Donovan, a fellow in psychiatry at UCSF. Five years later, researchers measured the surviving patients’ inflammation markers again, and discovered that the participants who had originally reported the highest levels of trauma still had the highest levels of inflammation. read more here