70 Fun Facts About Stress

Which Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist introduced the word "stress" to biology in the 1930s?

He spent most of his career in Montreal, and his 1956 bestseller for general readers turned the idea into a household word.

Before biologists borrowed it, the word "stress" was a technical term in which field?

In engineering it still means the internal distribution of force within a material, and the biological sense was an analogy that stuck.

The endocrinologist who introduced "stress" to biology was born in 1907 in which city?

He was born in Austria-Hungary and later became a fixture of McGill University and the Université de Montréal.

In the general adaptation syndrome, what final stage follows the alarm and resistance phases?

The model was meant to describe any organism's non-specific response to a threat, and its author was blunt that the last stage ends in death if the stressor never lets up.

What term did the father of stress research coin for positive, beneficial stress?

The prefix is Greek for good; the unpleasant kind he called distress, and he argued the body's response is the same either way.

Which 1956 bestseller by Hans Selye brought his general adaptation syndrome ideas to the public?

It was written for doctors and lay readers alike; the other three titles are real stress books by other authors.

Which Harvard physiologist coined 'fight or flight' and wrote The Wisdom of the Body (1932)?

He also pioneered feeding patients bismuth and barium so their digestive tracts would show up on X-rays.

In what year was the fight-or-flight response first described?

The Harvard physiologist who described it wrote of "the necessities of fighting or flight" the following year.

In fight-or-flight, the adrenal medulla releases norepinephrine and which other hormone?

It speeds the heart, opens the airways and shunts blood toward the muscles.

What happens to the pupils during the fight-or-flight response?

More light means better vision for spotting the threat; at the same time blood is pulled away from the gut, which is why fear kills appetite.

Popular extensions of "fight or flight" add which two further F responses?

Freezing is the deer-in-headlights response; fawning means appeasing the threat. Some versions include faint as well.

Which branch of the autonomic nervous system drives the fight-or-flight response?

Its opposite number takes over once the threat passes, and the two are constantly trading control like a see-saw.

The parasympathetic nervous system is often summarised by which four-word phrase?

The cheekier version is "feed and breed". It slows the heart and gets digestion moving again once the threat has passed.

Cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, is produced mainly by which part of the adrenal gland?

Specifically the zona fasciculata, the middle layer of the cortex. The medulla, by contrast, makes the fast-acting catecholamines.

Cortisol raises blood sugar and has what effect on the immune system?

That is why synthetic versions such as hydrocortisone are used to calm inflammation, and why chronic stress leaves people more prone to infections.

In a healthy person, cortisol levels are naturally highest at what time?

The peak comes just before or at waking, part of the daily rhythm that helps get you out of bed.

Which pituitary hormone signals the adrenal glands to make cortisol?

Adrenocorticotropic hormone is the middle link of the HPA axis, the chain of command from hypothalamus to pituitary to adrenals.

Chronically excessive cortisol produces which named condition?

Its opposite, too little cortisol, is Addison's disease, which John F. Kennedy lived with for most of his adult life.

The stress-response chain known as the HPA axis links the hypothalamus, the pituitary and which glands?

The end product is cortisol, and one of its jobs is to dampen the immune system so the body can spend energy elsewhere.

Where in the body are the adrenal glands located?

The name says so: it comes from the Latin ad, near, and ren, kidney. The right one is pyramidal, the left crescent-shaped.

In 1901 Jokichi Takamine patented a purified extract from the adrenal glands. What was it?

Parke, Davis & Co trademarked it in the US as Adrenalin; today the same drug, as epinephrine, is what an auto-injector delivers during anaphylaxis.

Cortisone was first identified by Edward Kendall and Harold Mason at which US institution?

Kendall shared the 1950 Nobel Prize with Philip Hench and Tadeusz Reichstein for working out the structure and function of the adrenal hormones.

On the 1967 Holmes and Rahe stress scale, which life event scores the maximum 100 points?

Divorce scores 73 and a vacation 13. Rack up more than 300 points in a year and the scale says you are at risk of illness.

On the Holmes and Rahe scale, getting married scores how many life-change units?

The scale treats any big change as stressful, happy or not; a major holiday scores 12 and a vacation 13.

Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe built their 1967 stress scale from records of 5,000 what?

They were looking for whether the pile-up of life events in the months before illness could predict who got sick.

The Yerkes-Dodson law, published in 1908, describes the relationship between performance and what?

Performance rises with pressure only up to a point, then falls away, giving the famous inverted-U curve. The original subjects were dancing mice.

Which German-born American psychologist used the term "burn-out" in a 1974 paper titled "Staff Burn-Out"?

He was describing volunteers at a free clinic, himself included; Maslach later built the questionnaire that made the concept measurable.

How does the WHO's ICD-11 classify burnout?

It sits in the chapter on factors influencing health status, not among the diseases, which surprised many headline writers in 2019.

Besides reduced accomplishment and emotional exhaustion, what is the Maslach Burnout Inventory's third dimension?

Depersonalization means an unfeeling, impersonal response toward the people you are supposed to be helping.

The Japanese word karoshi translates as what?

The first recognised case was reported in 1969, when a 29-year-old shipping worker died of a stroke.

Jon Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in the 1970s at which institution?

The course mixes meditation, body scanning and yoga, and has been copied by hospitals worldwide.

How long does the standard MBSR course run?

Body scanning is introduced in the first four weeks; participants also get a full-day retreat partway through.

The Whitehall studies of stress and health followed which group of workers?

Men in the lowest grades, such as messengers and doorkeepers, had a mortality rate three times that of top administrators, upending the myth of executive stress.

Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, triggered by intense emotional stress, is better known by what name?

The left ventricle balloons into the shape of a Japanese fishing pot, the takotsubo, and about 90 percent of patients are women, mostly postmenopausal.

The stress-induced heart condition takotsubo is named after a Japanese pot used to catch what?

The heart's left ventricle takes on the round-jar shape of the trap. Hikaru Sato first described the condition in 1990.

In which edition of the DSM was post-traumatic stress disorder first officially recognised?

The term had come into use in the 1970s, largely through the diagnoses of US veterans of the Vietnam War.

The term "shell shock" was coined during which 1915 battle?

It reflected the belief that exploding artillery shells physically damaged the brain; as many as 40 percent of casualties at the Somme in 1916 were said to be shell-shocked.

In 1917 what did the British Army do about the diagnosis "shell shock"?

Mentions were censored even in medical journals; the condition was later called war nerves, neurasthenia and combat neurosis before PTSD arrived in 1980.

Which bacterium did Barry Marshall and Robin Warren show causes stomach ulcers?

The bacterium was formally described as the cause of gastric ulcers in 1983, and the pair won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

How did Barry Marshall try to prove that a bacterium, not stress, caused ulcers?

After failing to infect piglets, he swallowed the culture himself in 1984 expecting an ulcer years later; instead he was sick within days.

Baoding balls, the chiming spheres rolled in the palm to relieve stress, are named after a city in which country?

They date to the Ming dynasty and, unlike a foam stress ball, are solid and come in pairs.

A typical squeezable stress ball is usually no more than how wide?

Many are moulded from closed-cell polyurethane foam, which is why they spring back into shape.

The standard treadmill cardiac stress test protocol of 1963 is named after which cardiologist?

The treadmill gets steadily faster and steeper while an ECG watches the heart; patients who cannot exercise get a drug such as adenosine instead.

In a Bruce protocol treadmill test, how often are the speed and incline increased?

The incline goes up 2 percent at each stage; most healthy adults are done well before the seventh.

In mechanics, stress is force per unit area. What is its SI unit?

A pascal is one newton per square metre; the concept was put on rigorous footing by Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the 1820s.

Which two cardiologists first described the Type A personality as a heart-disease risk in the 1950s?

Later research found the tobacco industry had quietly funded much of the Type A work, hoping to blame personality rather than cigarettes for heart attacks.

Which UCLA psychologist first described the 'tend-and-befriend' model in 2000?

The theory proposes that, especially in females, stress can trigger protecting offspring and seeking allies rather than fighting or fleeing, with oxytocin doing much of the work.

'Allostatic load', the wear chronic stress puts on the body, was coined in 1993 by Eliot Stellar and which scientist?

The idea is that the same hormones that save you in a crisis quietly damage you if they never switch off.

In the Trier Social Stress Test, participants count backwards from 1,022 in steps of what?

Any slip means starting again from 1,022 while three unsmiling judges watch; the procedure was created at the University of Trier in 1993 to reliably raise cortisol in the lab.

The Trier Social Stress Test, the standard way to induce stress in a lab, was created in 1993 in which country?

Clemens Kirschbaum and colleagues designed it at the University of Trier; it reliably activates the HPA axis, so cortisol can be measured in saliva.

National Stress Awareness Month is observed in the United States during which month?

It was created in 1992 by the Health Resource Network, a non-profit that wanted health professionals to spend a month talking about causes and cures.

Robert Sapolsky's 1994 book on chronic stress asks why which animals don't get ulcers?

His point is that a zebra's stress is episodic, a lion appears and then it is over, whereas humans stew for months about mortgages and bosses.

What word completes the title of Epel and Blackburn's 2017 book on stress and ageing, The ___ Effect?

Epel's earlier study of mothers caring for chronically ill children examined telomeres and telomerase, and helped launch the idea that stress ages cells.

In which year did Sheldon Cohen and colleagues develop the Perceived Stress Scale?

It comes in 14-, 10- and 4-item versions and asks how unpredictable and overloaded your life has felt in the past month.

Which American physician developed progressive muscle relaxation?

He began the work in the 1920s; Benson later described the related "relaxation response", and Schultz invented autogenic training.

In the diathesis-stress model, "diathesis" comes from a Greek term meaning what?

The model was first used to explain schizophrenia in the 1960s by Paul Meehl: a vulnerability plus enough life stress tips a person into disorder.

The term "post-traumatic growth" was coined by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun at which university?

They defined it as positive psychological change from struggling with highly stressful circumstances, and built the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory in 1996 to measure it.

Suzanne Kobasa's psychological 'hardiness' combines commitment, control and which third attitude?

The three Cs describe people who see change as opportunity; Kobasa's original subjects were executives riding out corporate upheaval.

Which almond-shaped brain structure is central to processing fear and other emotional responses?

It sits deep in each temporal lobe and can trigger the stress response before the thinking parts of the brain have caught up.

From October 2012, US regulators required the largest banks to undergo 'stress tests' how often?

A bank stress test is a simulation run on the balance sheet to see whether the institution could survive a downturn; regulators took it up after 2007.

Sheldon Cohen linked chronic stress to greater susceptibility to which everyday illness?

Volunteers were deliberately exposed to cold viruses; those under long-running stress, such as caring for a spouse with dementia, were the ones who got sick.

In 1926 the author of The Wisdom of the Body used 'stress' for outside factors that disrupted what?

His idea of the body's steady internal state gave the later stress researchers something for stress to disturb.

How many times was Hans Selye nominated for the Nobel Prize without ever winning it?

The nominations came between 1949 and 1953; he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1968.

Which industry secretly paid Selye as a consultant from 1958, influencing his writing on smoking?

In 1969 he testified against Canadian anti-smoking laws while receiving $50,000 a year from a US research council.

Where in Canada did Selye begin his stress research in 1932 under James Bertram Collip?

He later directed the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal.

Which Slovak institution, the country's only Hungarian-language one, honours the stress pioneer?

Selye grew up in Komárom, a Hungarian-majority town that the 1920 Treaty of Trianon split in two.

What is cortisol called when used as a medication?

Low-dose creams of it are sold over the counter in some countries for rashes and eczema.

Which zone of the adrenal cortex produces most cortisol?

The glomerulosa makes aldosterone and the reticularis mainly androgens.

A 3 cm segment of scalp hair records roughly how long a period of cortisol exposure?

Hair cortisol is considered a reliable marker of chronic exposure, unlike a single blood or saliva sample.

At what stage of pregnancy does rising fetal cortisol trigger production of lung surfactant?

That surge helps the lungs mature in time for breathing air at birth.