A research group at Michigan State University conducted an work into how certain immune cells react to stress.
What they found is that the immune cell, known as the Mast cell, reacts to stress as it would an allergen. That means things like work deadlines or family stress could lead to inflammatory and allergic diseases...thins like irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, and food allergies.
Adam Moeser is the principal investigator for the study.
“Under our stressors that we experience every day, the mast cells are becoming chronically activated over long periods in time, because in nature when we respond to a threat these initial stress responses are meant to be very short lived.”
Moeser said the research team was able to manipulate the mast cells response and reduce stress diseases by 50 percent.
“What our study was investigating was trying to understand what are the signals in our bodies that are activating this Mast cell. If we can find that out maybe there is a potential target that we can focus on. Maybe its a drug target or a lifestyle target that we know that could block the pathway.”
He said now that the team knows how stress signals work, they can focus on ways to block the stress reaction.
“Now that we have this data and this pathway, our next steps are going to be focused on understanding how this system becomes regulated. We know that its an important part of this stress pathway but now we wanna see what happens downstream.”