Stress… How It Changes The Brain

May 1st, 2014

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

How well a person recovers from traumatic events may depend on in
part on their self-esteem, according to researchers who examined the
effects of a major earthquake on the survivors’ brains. ~ Bahar Gholipour

The researchers had conducted brain scans of university students for a
study before the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. After the
earthquake, they repeated the scans on 37 of the same people, and
tracked stress-induced changes in their brains in the following months.

“Most importantly, what these findings show, is that the brain is
dynamic — that it’s responding to things that are going on in our
environment, or things that are part of our personality,” said Rajita
Sinha, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, who wasn’t
involved in the study.

In the brain scans taken immediately after the incident, the
researchers found a decrease in the volume of two brain regions, the
hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex, compared with the scans taken
before the incident.

One year later, the researchers repeated the scans and found that the
hippocampus continued to shrink, and people’s levels of depression and
anxiety had not improved.

However, other changes in the brain had reversed, the researchers
found: The volume of the orbitofrontal cortex had increased. Moreover,
this increase was correlated with survivors’ self-esteem scores soon
after the earthquake, according to the study published today (April 29)
in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The findings suggest that structural changes in the brain following a
stressful event are not static, but dynamic, throughout one’s lifetime,
study researcher neuroscientist Atsushi Sekiguchi and his colleagues
wrote in their study.

It is possible that people with higher self-esteem, which is
important to a person’s resilience in the face of stressful life events,
can regulate emotional distress more successfully, and this is
reflected in their brain changes, the researchers said.

The researchers noted that the study cannot show a cause-and-effect
relationship, and it is difficult to know whether it really is higher
self-esteem that results in better recovery from trauma, or something
else that is related to self-esteem has a role.

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