What is it about?
Healthy coping strategies integrate nervous system responses in order to cope with stress . Survival circuits and defense responses are activated when threatening conditions are detected in the emotional area of the brain and a general arousal state is generated. During ongoing stress, resources may be depleted and cardiac damage occurs at a much lower threshold (heart enzyme, troponin T at even or > 4.2 ng/L).
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Why is it important?
No link between depressive symptoms and cardiac injury was found. However, chronic defence responses were mostly due to a lack of social support or interpersonal conflict and were linked to cardiac damage. This emphasizes that fatigue in the nervous system (physiological depression) or depletion of resources, precedes psychological depression with detrimental impact on cardiac health in the long-term and increase susceptibility for heart disease.
Perspectives
Individual resiliency will depend on the capacity of the individual to recover from the stressor by means of healthy in-control coping strategies with a voluntary mobilizing of social support from friends or family. Chronic defensiveness (behavioral in-control) may mask physiological loss-of-control responses or cardiac injury.
Professor Leoné Malan
North-West University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Chronic defensiveness and neuroendocrine dysfunction reflect a novel cardiac troponin T cut point: The SABPA study, Psychoneuroendocrinology, November 2017, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.07.492.
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