Dr. Alan Rozanski

and decrease in the hippocampus and in the prefrontal cortex.

That's been shown both in animal models of stress and looking at MRI studies of the brain.

So it's a real factor when it's chronic and when it's underbating stress.

I think that's very common.

We get acclimated to our situations.

And you could argue, we're living in a society today where it's all too sped up and we tolerate more stress than we should.

I think that you could make that case.

Well, there are a number of ways you can become aware.

First of all, stress can have bodily effects.

You can have tension.

So you can feel pain in your chest or arm.

That's often why patients come to us for stress testing and we'll, you know, do the testing to rule out heart disease.

But we, you know, quite often the somatic factors would do to stress.

So you have to look at that.

You might feel lightheaded and things like that.

Or you might feel fatigue.

Or you might just feel irritable.

I mean, there's many different ways in which you can feel the effects of chronic stress.

Well, that's a very interesting question.

When you look at the data, when we look at what has been studied, there are certain factors which have been studied tremendously, such as chronic stress we just mentioned.