Stress
 

We all know that stress is the Enemy, ready to rob us of our ability to function.

We also know that it is common for PD to come along after a stressful trigger such as the flu or tragedies.

We also learned in a lengthy thread on the old BT2 that, somewhat to our surprise, the great majority of us had a lot of stress in our lives growing up. I had an alcoholic father. Ron had the Blitz. Most of us fell in between but "high-stress" was typical for our childhoods and/or youth.

Now I would like to extend this a little and ask you all this question:

Based on what you know of your parent's early lives together, would you rate your mother's exposure to stress while she carried you as low, medium, or high?

Was she a worrier? Did she have the flu? Was your dad out of work? What was life like for her during those nine critical months? It may be important.

My father was manic depressive. I was born in 1948, within a year of his return from Europe and WWII. Between those two and my mother's controlling father, I would say my mother's life was stressful.

Have you found some research about this possible link? Or are you speculating, as any good researcher would do :)

From what I know, my mother was probably under an awful lot of stress when she was pregnant with me.

I'd like a few more replies before I get in very deep...
 

...but I've been reading and thinking, a dangerous combination :)

One thing I have been thinking about is the original descriptionof PD in Parkinson's infamous essay of 1817. Given how "noticeable" our condition is and how prevalent, why was it not described sooner?

The traditional speculation has been that the advent of the Industrial Revolution brought new toxins into the picture and that that triggered it, but I wonder.

Another thing that the IR brought was massive, rapid, and sustained change in society. A society can adapt adapt massive and rapid, but sustained (continuing) poses a different problem because adaptation is constant and there is no time for the systems to rest.

The reason I wondered about yo' mama is that stress on her affected the way we developed. And there is research that indicates that the effect can reverberate down several generations.

Then the question becomes what stresses were our grandmothers under and how are they affecting us today. And an even bigger one, do the effects accumulate and get more pronounced with each generation.

Sure are a lot of younger Parkies around then I would have expected....:confused:

Now there is an interesting statement! And interesting probably isn't a strong enough word to use.

I believe one would be hard pressed to find a human being on planet earth who isn't stressed today...finances, doing more with less at work, hunger (e.g. Darfur), living in cars/street, two income family, too much stuff (e.g. ipod, cell phone), climate change, discord between religions, fear of lawsuit, increase in the incidence of disease, living paycheck to paycheck, increase in # of socialist countries...heck, just the fear of allowing children to stand at a bus stop alone...goes on and on.

Suffice it to say, if there is a correlation between stress during pregnancy...well, that is pretty scary just in thought.

While I clearly believe that the toxins we breath and eat in our food are the two primary reasons for the increase in the incidence of disease, to add stress during pregnancy, which is relatively unavoidable, and that effect on children. I am :Speechless:

Nothing is ever that simple with PD
 

When an embryo is forming, there are critical "windows" of time when particular parts are being formed and the nervous system is no exception. These windows may be only hours in length and may occur once today and then again for further genesis next week and so on. During those few hours the embryo is very vunerable to "outside" factors interfering with its formation. One of the vulnerabilities is the establishment of neurochemical relationships between hormones and receptors. The embryonic receptor is "locked in" by its first encounter with its intended chemical.

The danger is that if similar but different molecules are in the system that a certain number of them will get there first and things will get screwed up. Cortisol and other stress-related chemicals from the maternal system are one of the possible "spoilers". If mama is stressed during just the right time, her baby will bear a lifelong imprint. In fact, this is called "hormonal imprinting".

So, it's not that our mothers are expected to be non-stressed all the time. But if she is stressed ALL the time, then we can expect to be born with certain problems. Depending on the timing and the individual and later factors encountered (nutrition for example) these problems can be diabetes, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, hypertension, etc.

So, folks, do you think your mother was stressed a lot when she was carrying you? So far three out of three say yes. We need a bigger sample. Who will be number four? :)

Well, I can't say for sure that my mother was stressed when I was developing, but I do know two things: she was subject to anxiety to the point of a nervous breakdown as a young woman, and she had been told before I was conceived that having another baby could kill her. So I'd say she was probably pretty highly stressed.

Stress
 

Hi Rick,
I agree with Carolyn that everyone in modern living is stressed, but there is stress and extreme stress. I was born in 1936, and my parents had just bought their first house, with a heavy mortgage. My father was frequently out of work, and income was spasmodic. I remember my mother telling me that at one time, my father had raging toothache, but had not the money to go to a dentist. His schooling had stopped at 14, and he had given a false age when he was 16, to get into the army and fight in WW1. The storm clouds of WW2 were gathering, and it was clear there was going to be a war. My brother (aged 4 when my mother was carrying me) had a dreadful skin disease, and had to be bathed and covered in fresh bandages every couple of hours.
Times were much harder then, and I feel my mother was under extreme stress at the time she carried me. One thing that argues against this theory in my case, is that my sister was born in Feb.1942, and 9 months earlier, the German blitz fell on where we lived in Liverpool. I remember the bombing vividly, the German bombers were aiming for the vital docks, but with no laser targetting, they tended to saturate whole areas with bombs, (shock and awe!!!) Houses all around us were destroyed, and we waited for it to be us.
So why doesn't my sister suffer from PD? The only thing you can say about that is, she is in her mid 60's, and doesn't suffer YET!! I am 70.
I have raised previously the effect of a stress situation (which is known to open the pores of the blood brain barrier, (BBB) and admit toxins to the brain). I believe this is the cause of the worsening in symptoms in PD in a stress situation. PD people have been shown to have a more porous BBB or "leaky" BBB.

See
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/showthread.php?t=190
&highlight=Blood+Brain+Barrier


Presumably, the foetus similarly is given a dose of toxins when the mother suffers extreme stress, so maybe there is something in this idea. There may be a reduction in dopamine neurons, but enough neurons to last a number of decades, before natural loss of neurons with ageing, causes the threshold of 20% left, and PD symptoms start to show.

Ron

Ron...
 

...the timing is the critical thing. We are talking about "windows" sometimes as short as a few hours, so there is a lot of room for variance there.

The picture that is emerging is known as the "multiple hits" hypothesis and it is largely common sense. Assume there are a dozen possible factors that taken by themselves don't trigger problems but the more one encounters the greater the odds of PD or any of several other conditions developing.

The various factors have different levels of danger based on their impact and their prevalence. Stress scores big in both areas but even it doesn't trip the system by itself. But add in something like rotenone or our old friend H pylori and the odds shift.

While the following abstract doesn't address stress per se, it does give a hint at how this might work. And, by the way, this complexity is not necessarily cause for despair. Having multiple factors opens up multiple opportunities for therapies.

1: Exp Neurol. 2004 Dec;190(2):373-83.

Rotenone potentiates dopamine neuron loss in animals exposed to
lipopolysaccharide prenatally.

Ling Z, Chang QA, Tong CW, Leurgans SE, Lipton JW, Carvey PM.

Department of Pharmacology, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL 60612,
USA. zling@rush.edu

We previously demonstrated that treating gravid female rats with the
bacteriotoxin lipopolysaccharide (LPS) led to the birth of offspring with fewer
than normal dopamine (DA) neurons. This DA neuron loss was long-lived and
associated with permanent increases in the pro-inflammatory cytokine tumor
necrosis factor alpha (TNFalpha). Because of this pro-inflammatory state, we
hypothesized that these animals would be more susceptible to subsequent exposure
of DA neurotoxins. We tested this hypothesis by treating female Sprague-Dawley
rats exposed to LPS or saline prenatally with a subtoxic dose of the DA
neurotoxin rotenone (1.25 mg/kg per day) or vehicle for 14 days when they were
16 months old. After another 14 days, the animals were sacrificed. Tyrosine
hydroxylase-immunoreactive (THir) cell counts were used as an index of DA neuron
survival. Animals exposed to LPS prenatally or rotenone postnatally exhibited a
22% and 3%, respectively, decrease in THir cell counts relative to controls. The
combined effects of prenatal LPS and postnatal rotenone exposure produced a
synergistic 39% THir cell loss relative to controls. This loss was associated
with decreased striatal DA and increased striatal DA activity ([HVA]/[DA]) and
TNFalpha. Animals exposed to LPS prenatally exhibited a marked increase in the
number of reactive microglia that was further increased by rotenone exposure.
Prenatal LPS exposure also led to increased levels of oxidized proteins and the
formation of alpha-Synuclein and eosin positive inclusions resembling Lewy
bodies. These results suggest that exposure to low doses of an environmental
neurotoxin like rotenone can produce synergistic DA neuron losses in animals
with a preexisting pro-inflammatory state. This supports the notion that
Parkinson's disease (PD) may be caused by multiple factors and the result of
"multiple hits" from environmental toxins.

PMID: 15530876 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Yes.
 

My mother was under a lot of stress when she was pregnant with me. My father's business partner was doctoring the firm's books, and when he was discovered, he put the blame on my father who was the junior partner. The case went all the way to the Danish 'Highest Court' where my father won the case. But he had been threatened with jail, and he had to start all over with a loan from his father, whom he hated, and had to set up his office in his father's house for the next six years.
Add to that my father's pathological jealousy - he accused my mother of flirting and having secret trysts with everyone from the cheating business partner to clowns in circus performances. His jealousy lost both him and my mother all their friends from childhood and youth.
My brother was born nine years earlier than me, and was a sickly child. He spent months at a time in hospital during childhood. He seemed to rally as an adult, and grew tall and strong looking, but at around the age of 60 he fell ill with a myriad of symptoms: he fainted, he fell, his heart grew weak, he had unstoppable nose bleeds. His diagnosis was undecided, he got weaker and weaker, and died at the age of 64. I don't think the doctors even considered PD as a possibility, but by now I do.
I've suffered from a certain amount of rigidity as long as I can remember, and my balance has always been iffy - I always fell down stairs and stumbled over pebbles, and I could not do many of the things required in school PD, like climb ropes or jump over 'the horse'. I dreamed of being able to control my movements, of moving with ease. It took many years for me to realize that something was wrong with me because rigidity and bad balance had always been the norm for me.
I have no doubt that my mother's stress during pregnancy damaged both my brother's health and mine - and that that same stress killed my mother, from cancer, at the age of 48.