Journal Articles on Stress and Asthma

Asthma

Review of psychosocial stress and asthma: an integrated biopsychosocial approach 

Three recent trends in medical research have led both clinicians and investigators to reconsider the role of psychosocial stress in asthma. Firstly, efforts to define the aetiological risk factors for the development and expression of disease have intensified in the face of rising trends in the prevalence and severity of asthma observed worldwide. Thus far, focus on traditional environmental risk factors has not fully explained these trends. Secondly, evidence evolved over the last two decades of important interactions among behavioural, neural, endocrine, and immune processes provides fresh insight into means by which psychosocial stressors may influence the development and expression of inflammatory diseases.

Psychological aspects of asthma

Asthma can be affected by stress, anxiety, sadness, and suggestion, as well as by environmental irritants or allergens, exercise, and infection. It also is associated with an elevated prevalence of anxiety and depressive disorders. Asthma and these psychological states and traits may mutually potentiate each other through direct psychophysiological mediation, nonadherence to medical regimen, exposure to asthma triggers, and inaccuracy of asthma symptom perception. Defensiveness is associated with inaccurate perception of airway resistance and stress-related bronchoconstriction. Asthma education programs that teach about the nature of the disease, medications, and trigger avoidance tend to reduce asthma morbidity. Other promising psychological interventions as adjuncts to medical treatment include training in symptom perception, stress management, hypnosis, yoga, and several biofeedback procedures.

Review of psychosocial stress and asthma: an integrated biopsychosocial approach

Environmental stressors may impact asthma morbidity through neuroimmunological mechanisms which are adversely impacted and/or buffered y social networks, social support, and psychological functioning. In addition, life stress may impact on health beliefs and behaviours that may affect asthma management. Whereas earlier psychosomatic models have supported a role for psychological stress in contributing to variable asthma morbidity among those with existing disease, a growing appreciation of the interactions between behavioural, neural, endocrine, and immune processes suggest a role for these psychosocial factors in the genesis of asthma as well. While a causal link between stress and asthma has not bee established, this review provides a framework in which we can begin to see links between these systems that might provide new insights to guide future explorations. The complexity of these interactions underscore the need for a multidisciplinary approach which combines the idea that the origin of asthma is purely psychogenic in nature with the antithetical consideration that the biological aspects are all important. These distinctions are artificial, and future research that synthesizes biological, psychological, sociocultural, and family parameters is urgently needed to further our understanding of the rising burden of asthma.

The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine

The theory behind psychosomatic illness today uses the example of a three-legged stool concept, also known as the biopsychosocial model, was formulated by George L. Engel a psychiatrist at the University of Rochester. This is the article he wrote to explain this model.