Wisdom Wednesday: When Stress Hormone Falters, Your Health May Suffer

Steady daytime levels of the stress hormone cortisol are associated with serious health problems, such as inflammation, obesity and cancer, researchers say.

“Cortisol is naturally high in the morning to help perk you up, and it decreases into the evening,” said study lead author Emma Adam. She is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University.

“The loss of this cycle – or the lack of variation of cortisol – is what is associated with negative health outcomes in our study,” Adam said in a university news release. The researchers suspect that chronic stress may be behind the less variable cortisol levels. They call it “stress-related circadian dysregulation.”

For the research, the study team reviewed data from 80 studies. The investigators looked specifically at 12 health problems and found that 10 seemed associated with the loss of variation in cortisol levels.

“While inflammation and the immune system dysfunction had the strongest associations, fatigue, cancer, depression, and obesity were all worse in people who had less variation in their cortisol,” Adam said.

The findings suggest that restoring daily cortisol rhythms could benefit people’s health. “It’s the righting of the rhythms that are important, more so than the righting of levels,” the researchers wrote.

Adopting healthy habits – such as regular exercise and adequate sleep – are important steps in restoring strong daily cortisol rhythms, Adam and her colleagues said.

Wisdom Wednesday: Circadian Rhythms

Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, responding primarily to light and darkness in the environment. They are found in most living things, including tiny microbes.

Biological clocks throughout the body control these rhythms. The “master clock” or suprachissmatic nucleus (SCM) is located in the hypothalamus of the brain. Circadian rhythms influence sleep-wake cycles, hormone release, body temperature and other body functions. They have been linked to various sleep disorders, including insomnia.

As daylight strikes our eyes this information is relayed to the brain, the SCM receives this data and stimulates the pineal gland to produce melatonin. At night, the SCM activates the melatonin, cutting off most of the stimulation to the hypothalamus, and we get drowsy.

Melatonin is a hormone and it has a modulating effect on all the other hormones in the body. Please review these two blogs – “The Evolution of Sleep: 700 Million Years of Melatonin” posted on 10/13/14 and “Chaste Tree” posted 8/20/14. This modulating effect pushes hormone production toward homeostasis. The effect is mild, but often very effective. So if your testosterone is a little low and the estrogen a little high, melatonin will drive the testosterone production up and the estrogen production down.

Clinically, the two most revealing questions I ask my patients are “How are you sleeping?” and “How is your sex drive?” The answers tell me much about the patient’s general health, specifically how well the endocrine system is functioning. Typically, new patients are struggling in both these areas of function.