Stress: the good, the bad and the ugly?

Excerpt

In a world with increasing life span, societies with more and more people living longer and longer, ageing research within both disciplines, gerontology (investigation of mechanisms of ageing) as well as geriatrics (treatment of elderly frail patients) are particularly relevant to society. With this increase in life span, the causes of death have changed towards degenerative diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases. There is a growing body of evidence that high or long-lasting stress results in permanent changes in the individual response capacity that influence susceptibility to disease and functional decline. Indeed, it seems to be a well-known fact that stress is a problem per se: a lot of news about biological stress, disease stress, posttraumatic stress, social stress, nutritional stress, job stress, and other stress, as well as the anticipation of stress (even if it is objectively not high) pointed to the well-known bridge towards degenerative diseases and ageing. Whereas this connection seems to be easy, we have to realize that this is not true. …