Dr. Ida Fonkoue

I'm going to again start back to when I was studying veterans.

I was a work, federal employee, what we call work is work without compensation.

So I was employed by MRE, but I was actually working at the Atlanta VA.

And studying predominantly African American male veteran, what we noticed is that those with post-traumatic stress disorder had a high

Again, we call it sympathetic nerve activity, but it's your fight or flight.

A higher fight or flight activity at rest than to have higher resting heart rate.

And in response to stress, they even had, these are all, by the way, these are what we call in the field cardiovascular risk factors.

Having a high resting fight or flight, having a higher resting heart rate,

and having a higher response to stress.

In this case, we stress them using, again, math acutely.

It's like using an acute stress on top of a chronic existing stress.

So what we saw was that this veteran with PTSD had about three or four, what we call independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

High inflammation.

Inflammation is supposed to be when you have a fever and inflammation.

However,

Low-grade inflammation, you're not necessarily having a high temperature, but your cells are feeling like under stress.

They feel that temperature even if you don't feel it.

So we saw that high inflammation, high fight or flight response, blunted cardovagal baroreflex, which means your baroreflex is the ability of your nervous system to regulate your blood pressure.

When it's high, your fight or flight should go down when blood pressure is high.

When it's low, your fight or flight should go up so that blood pressure can go up.