Dr. Alan Rozanski

And over time, that gravitated to the effects of chronic stress.

And then that gravitated over time to looking at what are all the factors that might affect the heart besides just the physical factors we would look at like exercise and diet and so forth.

So that's how I got going.

Well, you know, it's kind of interesting because at that time I was focusing on acute stress and it was compatible with data that we've seen that during heart attacks, even during world-class soccer matches and so forth, there are some people who will develop heart attacks and so forth.

Fortunately, that doesn't happen to most people.

And I emphasize that the data we saw when people with advanced heart disease, when we give those tests to normal people, that wouldn't occur.

So I'm not sure it taught us much more than that.

What was much more important was when I began to look at the effects of chronic stress and

other factors.

So it's very important here to distinguish between, let's say, good stress and bad or chronic stress.

I think we've

created because of the medical findings in terms of what stress can do to the heart i haven't looked at the flip side in terms of the good things that challenge that managing stress does for us but in short if you have stress that we would call toxic which might be stress you can't control with a lot of emotional reactivity reactivity to the stress um if it's an abating stress for example

This can affect the metabolism of your body.

You can have the development of insulin resistance.

You can develop inflammation.

You can develop abnormalities in the lining of vessels.

There's data showing that it can affect actually immunological factors to the bone marrow, which eventually cause the development of atherosclerosis.

So there's an increased risk of atherosclerosis.

And it can affect the brain too.

We see that people under chronic stress can have enlargement of the amygdala or the fear center.