Читать книгу The Slim Book of Health Pearls: Hormones, Nerves, and Stress - Sheldon Cohen M.D. FACP - Страница 4

Hans Selye (1907-1982) is the father of modern stress theory. How did it start?

As a young endocrinologist in the 1930’s, working in Canada, he embarked upon research to discover a new sex hormone. He injected laboratory rats with an ovarian extract hoping to produce physical changes in the rats which would prove the new hormone’s existence. What he found instead were rats with bleeding stomach ulcers, enlargement of the adrenal glands, and shrinkage of the spleen, thymus and lymph nodes (the reasons for these change will be discussed later). Upon injecting the rats with an entirely different extract, to his surprise he duplicated the previous results. He reasoned that the cause of the findings in the rats had nothing to do with exposure to an unknown sex hormone, but rather resulted from an exposure to some “toxic” agent. This was all reminiscent of what he learned as a young medical student in Czechoslovakia where patients with different infectious diseases manifested symptoms in common making it difficult to diagnose a specific disease based upon the patient’s symptoms. He finally reasoned that these rats had some variables they all shared resulting in similar changes to their bodies. What were the variables that caused these physiological changes in their lives?

The only things that his rats had in common was that they were all captives, were locked in cages, injected often, chased around the room when they escaped their cages, and, in general, were not happy campers. They were under “stress” on a daily basis thus causing the similar changes in their physiology. From this came the concept of a “General Adaptation Syndrome,” or stress reaction. What Dr. Selye had discovered was the body-mind connection, the concept of stress changing body physiology and promoting disease; an amazing leap forward in medical knowledge.

So, with that background, what is the human stress reaction? How does it work its magic to save lives? How does it injure or kill? What parts of the body are involved in this schizophrenic physiology? To understand this we need to learn about:

1.The endocrine system

2.The nervous system

These are the principle players in this intense drama.

First we start with the endocrine system as it was understood in the early 1900’s.