Stress and health insurance

Stress is a part of life. You feel it when you’re preparing for the holidays, stuck in traffic or worrying about a friend’s health. While a little stress is nothing to fret about, the kind of intense worry that lingers for weeks or months may make it hard for you to stay healthy.

Stress and heart attack and stroke

The researchers from Harvard University suggested stress could be as important a risk factor as smoking or high blood pressure. They looked at the brain scans of 293 people, and suggested that when you are stressed, your amygdala (an area of the brain that deals with stress) signals to the bone marrow to produce extra white blood cells. This in turn causes the arteries to become inflamed. The link between activity in the amygdala and later heart events and stroke was due to increased bone-marrow activity and arterial inflammation.

Another study looked specifically at inflammation of the arteries and activity in the amygdala in highly stressed people, and again found an association between raised amygdala activity and more arterial inflammation. People who rated themselves as more stressed were also more likely to have higher levels of activity in the amygdala.

The link between stress and increased risk of developing heart disease has previously focused on the lifestyle habits people take up when they feel stressed such as smoking, drinking too much alcohol and overeating. But exploring the brain’s management of stress and discovering why it increases the risk of heart disease will allow us to develop new ways of managing chronic psychological stress.

Stress and diabetes

Many latest studies suggest that diabetes and stress appear to be linked in several important ways. Namely, stress can both contribute to and be a consequence of diabetes. People who experience stress, depression, anxiety, or a combination of these conditions are at higher risk of developing diabetes.

During stress, your body releases adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. Cortisol is commonly known as the stress hormone, can stimulate the production of glucose in the body and raise a person’s blood sugar.

Stress can activate the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system. This can cause hormonal changes, such as higher cortisol levels and lower levels of sex hormones. The levels of these hormones affect insulin levels.

Even though researchers have many theories as to how diabetes and stress are linked, the actual pathways that connect the two conditions remain unknown. However, if you ask people with diabetes, who regularly measures their glucose levels and analyze the reasons if sugar is high, will tell you that a stressful event can raise it sky high.

Stress and major depression

Chronic stress can cause depression. Depression is a difficult condition to understand as there are so many different triggers that can cause its onset: family history, personality traits, pregnancy, loneliness, illness, life stresses, bereavement, alcohol and drugs. Depression is diagnosed when an individual has a consistently low mood and is unable to find interest or enjoyment, within some work or social environments.

Being diagnosed with depression can bring a mixture of emotions, relief that there is a name for what you are feeling, and depression that you have depression.

For people with mental health conditions it can be hard to come to the realization that you have a mental health condition, whilst you are in it, as symptoms can develop overtime without you even noticing it.

Major depression can leave you unable to work. While you’ll receive disability benefits, mental illness is not a covered condition in critical illness policies. As a result, only the disability policy will pay.

Stress and cancer

Research has not proven a definite cause-and-effect relationship between stress and cancer. However, it has been found that stress hormones can inhibit a process called anoikis, which kills diseased cells and prevents them from spreading. Chronic stress also increases the production of certain growth factors that increase your blood supply, which can speed up the development of cancerous tumors.

Stress and health insurance

Managing stress (or at least trying to) is of vital importance for everybody. However, you have to realize that if you are experiencing chronic stress you have to have appropriate health insurance.