By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY
Firefighter Larry Cullison knows on-the-job stress too well. Like the time he and his crew tried — but failed — to rescue a 5-year-old girl from an inferno. Or the day he watched a fireman just one step in front of him plunge to a home's basement after the floor gave way.
Now, the 59-year-old firefighter from Warsaw, Ohio, is facing five-alarm stress off the job: His wife of 39 years has Alzheimer's disease.
How does Cullison deal with the 24/7 stress? His motto: Keep calm.
Cullison does everything he can to reduce stress. He has cut his work time by about half. He lifts weights daily. He tries to stay focused on the goal at hand. And when things get really rough with his wife, Tommy Marie, he turns to a time-honored method of reducing stress: prayer.
"I know that God is there working with me," he says.
His calm, can-do approach to life not only helps his wife, but might protect Cullison as well, according to recent research from scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and elsewhere.
Studies suggest that high levels of stress can lead to obesity and trigger a raft of diseases — from heart attacks to ulcers. These and other stress-related diseases sicken millions of people each year in the USA, says brain researcher Bruce McEwen at the Rockefeller University in New York.
Up to 90% of the doctor visits in the USA may be triggered by a stress-related illness, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=left><TBODY><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=190 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=notch_header width=1 rowSpan=3>
</TD><TD class=notch_header width=180> Ways to avoid stress</TD><TD class=notch_header width=1 rowSpan=3>
</TD><TD rowSpan=3>
</TD></TR><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR class=sidebar><TD vAlign=top>
</TD></TR><TR><TD vAlign=top><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=2 width="99%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=sidebar vAlign=top>Stress doesn't have to be toxic. Experts such as Eva Selhub of the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston say people can protect themselves with some simple, but powerful, techniques. Some examples of stressbusters:
• Get regular exercise.
• Find the time to pray or meditate.
• Ask for help when demands pile up.
• Develop a support network of friends or family members.
• Look at unavoidable stress as an opportunity for growth.</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR class=sidebar><TD vAlign=top>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR><TD class=notch_header width=180 height=1>
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Stress is the body's response to having an argument or getting hit with an unexpected tax bill. The adrenal glands crank out hormones like adrenaline that drive up blood pressure. With chronic stress, those hormones stay at dangerously high levels.
And now, new research suggests that over-the-top stress can go beyond the temporary increase in blood pressure to actually injure cells of the body. That injury may accelerate the aging process, leaving people prone to a laundry list of diseases.
Stress works at the cellular level
Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues turned to women under a crushing burden of stress: mothers of sick kids. The researchers began to peer deep inside their cells to see if stress affected a key part of the chromosome called a telomere.
Telomeres are thought to be markers of aging, says co-author Richard Cawthon of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Telomeres cap the ends of chromosomes, which contain the body's DNA.
As people get older, this cap gets ground down. When the telomere gets too short to work properly, cells all over the body start to sicken or die — and diseases of old age set in, Cawthon says.
The California researchers found that the longer women had been caring for a child with a serious illness, the shorter the telomere, a finding that suggests rapid aging.
"It's very sad," Epel says. "These women are paying a personal price."
But the toxic stress response wasn't confined to caregivers: This study, published in the Nov. 30 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that stress also affected mothers of healthy kids.
Most of the women in this group, the control group, didn't report burn-out levels of stress. But those that did had the same response: shorter telomeres.
In fact, when the researchers looked only at stressed-out women in either group, they found a dramatic sign of damage. "They had lost the amount of telomeric DNA that one would expect to lose in 10 years of aging," Epel says.
Researchers Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser at Ohio State University turned to a different group of people under grinding stress: caregivers of Alzheimer's patients, people who often put in 100 hours a week or more on care for someone who has this progressive brain disease.
The team began to look for a damaging substance in the blood called interleukin-6, or Il-6.
Il-6 levels go up as people get older. "But caregivers had levels of Il-6 that increased dramatically," Glaser says. Overly ramped-up Il-6 might make caregivers vulnerable to diseases common among the elderly, such as arthritis, he says.
The average caregiver was about 70 but had Il-6 levels that looked like those of a 90-year-old, Kiecolt-Glaser says.
A positive outlook can help
"We all have stressful things happen to us," Cawthon says. "You can have a divorce. You can be in a car accident — there are so many things that cause stress," he says.
Does that stress doom us to DNA damage? Probably not.
Caregivers in the UCSF study who viewed their situation positively didn't seem to suffer the ill effects of stress, Epel says. A positive outlook on life and the support of friends might help buffer a damaging stress response, she says.
When Cullison's wife got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's at age 58, it forced him to slow down, a step that many experts say might help reign in stress.
Before the illness, Cullison worked 60 to 80 hours a week. He worked full time as a firefighter, but to make ends meet he also sold firefighting equipment and taught a course for emergency medical technicians.
He knew that he and his wife would suffer if he didn't deal with his crazy work schedule. So he took a promotion (and a pay cut) to a 40-hour-a-week job as fire chief. While that job can breed its own form of stress, it is a move he has never regretted.
"We got married 39 years ago because we loved each other and wanted to spend time together," he says. "It dawned on me I had better slow down because I don't know how long I'll have her."
<SCRIPT language=JavaScript> if (((new String(navigator.type))==4)&&((new String(navigator.version)).indexOf("4.")!=-1)){ //setTimeout necessary for Netscape4 to render button window.setTimeout("MM_showHideLayers('rightsLinkNSlyr','','show');", 500); } else { eval(document.getElementById("rightsLinkButton").innerHTML = '
'); } function RightslinkPopUp(){ var url = "https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet"; var location = url + "?publisherName=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&publication=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&title=" + escape( "Stress can ravage the body " ) // required + "&publicationDate=" + escape( "03/21/2005") // required + "&author=" + escape( "By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY" ) + "&contentID=" + escape( "http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-21-stress_x.htm" ) // required + "&orderBeanReset=true"; // required, hard-coded PopUp = window.open( location, "Rightslink", "toolbar=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=650,height=550"); } </SCRIPT>
Firefighter Larry Cullison knows on-the-job stress too well. Like the time he and his crew tried — but failed — to rescue a 5-year-old girl from an inferno. Or the day he watched a fireman just one step in front of him plunge to a home's basement after the floor gave way.
Now, the 59-year-old firefighter from Warsaw, Ohio, is facing five-alarm stress off the job: His wife of 39 years has Alzheimer's disease.
How does Cullison deal with the 24/7 stress? His motto: Keep calm.
Cullison does everything he can to reduce stress. He has cut his work time by about half. He lifts weights daily. He tries to stay focused on the goal at hand. And when things get really rough with his wife, Tommy Marie, he turns to a time-honored method of reducing stress: prayer.
"I know that God is there working with me," he says.
His calm, can-do approach to life not only helps his wife, but might protect Cullison as well, according to recent research from scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and elsewhere.
Studies suggest that high levels of stress can lead to obesity and trigger a raft of diseases — from heart attacks to ulcers. These and other stress-related diseases sicken millions of people each year in the USA, says brain researcher Bruce McEwen at the Rockefeller University in New York.
Up to 90% of the doctor visits in the USA may be triggered by a stress-related illness, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 align=left><TBODY><TR><TD><TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width=190 border=0><TBODY><TR><TD class=notch_header width=1 rowSpan=3>
• Get regular exercise.
• Find the time to pray or meditate.
• Ask for help when demands pile up.
• Develop a support network of friends or family members.
• Look at unavoidable stress as an opportunity for growth.</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></TD></TR><TR class=sidebar><TD vAlign=top>
Stress is the body's response to having an argument or getting hit with an unexpected tax bill. The adrenal glands crank out hormones like adrenaline that drive up blood pressure. With chronic stress, those hormones stay at dangerously high levels.
And now, new research suggests that over-the-top stress can go beyond the temporary increase in blood pressure to actually injure cells of the body. That injury may accelerate the aging process, leaving people prone to a laundry list of diseases.
Stress works at the cellular level
Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues turned to women under a crushing burden of stress: mothers of sick kids. The researchers began to peer deep inside their cells to see if stress affected a key part of the chromosome called a telomere.
Telomeres are thought to be markers of aging, says co-author Richard Cawthon of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Telomeres cap the ends of chromosomes, which contain the body's DNA.
As people get older, this cap gets ground down. When the telomere gets too short to work properly, cells all over the body start to sicken or die — and diseases of old age set in, Cawthon says.
The California researchers found that the longer women had been caring for a child with a serious illness, the shorter the telomere, a finding that suggests rapid aging.
"It's very sad," Epel says. "These women are paying a personal price."
But the toxic stress response wasn't confined to caregivers: This study, published in the Nov. 30 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that stress also affected mothers of healthy kids.
Most of the women in this group, the control group, didn't report burn-out levels of stress. But those that did had the same response: shorter telomeres.
In fact, when the researchers looked only at stressed-out women in either group, they found a dramatic sign of damage. "They had lost the amount of telomeric DNA that one would expect to lose in 10 years of aging," Epel says.
Researchers Ronald Glaser and Janice Kiecolt-Glaser at Ohio State University turned to a different group of people under grinding stress: caregivers of Alzheimer's patients, people who often put in 100 hours a week or more on care for someone who has this progressive brain disease.
The team began to look for a damaging substance in the blood called interleukin-6, or Il-6.
Il-6 levels go up as people get older. "But caregivers had levels of Il-6 that increased dramatically," Glaser says. Overly ramped-up Il-6 might make caregivers vulnerable to diseases common among the elderly, such as arthritis, he says.
The average caregiver was about 70 but had Il-6 levels that looked like those of a 90-year-old, Kiecolt-Glaser says.
A positive outlook can help
"We all have stressful things happen to us," Cawthon says. "You can have a divorce. You can be in a car accident — there are so many things that cause stress," he says.
Does that stress doom us to DNA damage? Probably not.
Caregivers in the UCSF study who viewed their situation positively didn't seem to suffer the ill effects of stress, Epel says. A positive outlook on life and the support of friends might help buffer a damaging stress response, she says.
When Cullison's wife got a diagnosis of Alzheimer's at age 58, it forced him to slow down, a step that many experts say might help reign in stress.
Before the illness, Cullison worked 60 to 80 hours a week. He worked full time as a firefighter, but to make ends meet he also sold firefighting equipment and taught a course for emergency medical technicians.
He knew that he and his wife would suffer if he didn't deal with his crazy work schedule. So he took a promotion (and a pay cut) to a 40-hour-a-week job as fire chief. While that job can breed its own form of stress, it is a move he has never regretted.
"We got married 39 years ago because we loved each other and wanted to spend time together," he says. "It dawned on me I had better slow down because I don't know how long I'll have her."
<SCRIPT language=JavaScript> if (((new String(navigator.type))==4)&&((new String(navigator.version)).indexOf("4.")!=-1)){ //setTimeout necessary for Netscape4 to render button window.setTimeout("MM_showHideLayers('rightsLinkNSlyr','','show');", 500); } else { eval(document.getElementById("rightsLinkButton").innerHTML = '
'); } function RightslinkPopUp(){ var url = "https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet"; var location = url + "?publisherName=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&publication=" + escape( "USATODAY" ) // required, hard-coded + "&title=" + escape( "Stress can ravage the body " ) // required + "&publicationDate=" + escape( "03/21/2005") // required + "&author=" + escape( "By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY" ) + "&contentID=" + escape( "http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-03-21-stress_x.htm" ) // required + "&orderBeanReset=true"; // required, hard-coded PopUp = window.open( location, "Rightslink", "toolbar=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,width=650,height=550"); } </SCRIPT>
