Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This 2013 review explains how physical and psychological stress change the brain and body. It describes how stress activates the HPA (hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal) system and alters brain chemicals such as GABA, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. The paper also covers short-term memory effects, animal models used to study chronic stress, and both…
This chapter says stress is an important risk factor for bipolar disorder. Stress hormones like (nor)adrenaline and corticosteroids reach the brain and change how neurons work. Right after stress people tend to process emotions more and higher thinking less, and later the opposite can happen. In bipolar disorder, baseline corticosteroid…
