Long-Term Stress Make Our Brain Shrink

Reputation of stress as a cause of guard cells in the body becomes sluggish security has long been known. However, the impact of stress to health does not stop there. Stress also causes the brain to shrink a long time.
There are many causes of stress, such as unhappy marriages, jobs less stressful, traumatic events, up to trivial issues such as congestion. If chronic stress is left then the impact is quite harmful to the brain.

When stressed the body releases chemicals. In the long run these chemicals will be toxic to brain tissue, it can even kill brain cells when chemicals called corticosteroids was abundant and long lasting.
Corticosteroids are actually required by the body to increase the speed of reaction to the threat or often called the fight or escape response (fight or flight), by suppressing the immune system and increase the amount of sugar in the blood circulation.

Hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for memory formation, is the most vulnerable to stress. That's why experts consider stress is closely related to the occurrence of dementia.
The scientists found that smaller brain condition that when they did brain scans of patients suffering from post traumatic stress of 9 / 11 attacks. The smaller size of the hippocampus was almost equal to the size of the brains of elderly patients with dementia.

Even so, experts said the results of this study may be too early to conclude the effects of stress on the brain because the number of respondents is too small.
While some studies have found that war veterans suffering from post traumatic syndrome also suffer from a severe brain disorder.

The study also revealed that the stress experienced by middle age can increase the risk of Alzheimer's. They are often under stress and anxiety are also two times higher risk of suffering from dementia.