Physical stress at work is related to signs of brain aging and memory loss

For the first time, scientists have linked work-related stress to brain aging and memory loss, according to new research from Colorado State University.

Their findings relate to a very specific type of stress. Through surveys on people’s most recent jobs, memory tests and scans of their brains, they found brain changes and remember problems in people who found their jobs physical stressful.

But interestingly enough, the people who reported ‘physical stress’ at work didn’t necessarily have labor-intensive jobs.

Still, mental stress at work was not associated with volume loss in the hippocampus – a part of the brain essential to memory – or difficulty completing memory-based tasks.

The researchers aren’t yet sure why the perception of physical stress could lead to faster brain aging, but their work could shed light on “ the dark side of physical activity, ” lead study author Dr. Aga Burzynska told DailyMail.com.

Stress is known to be destructive to the mind, but most research on its effects has focused on chronic stress, such as financial concerns, health problems, abuse relationships or racism – not someone’s profession.

Scientists at Colorado State University (CSU) compared the size of an area of ​​the brain that’s largely responsible for memory, called the hippocampus, to older people of different professions.

The brain scans they made showed that those whose most recent job was physically stressful had smaller hippocampuses than those who reported mental stress at work.

And those same physically stressed people struggled more with tasks for which they had to recall information.

Although the subjects were cognitively healthy at the time of the study, changes in the brain and memory capacities may relate to signs that they are more likely to decrease than others.

The CSU researchers asked 99 people between the ages of 60 and 79 about their most recent job.

Participants were questioned about what their profession was, their titles in those professions, how many years of education they had, their family income, the type of tasks they had to do, and they had some sort of stress they had experienced at work.

Those data were compared with MRI scans of participants’ brains and their performance on memory tasks.

During the screening process for the study, none of the participants showed clear signs of cognitive impairment, suffered from mental or neurological disorders, and never (as far as is known) had strokes.

So in terms of brain structure, you could expect their brains to be somewhat similar.

But both the scans and the memory tasks showed a clear difference in the minds of those who felt that their work was physically stressful.

To be clear, these were not physical workers. In fact, only one of the study participants would be considered a physical worker if asked to categorize the type of work he was doing.

Most of the subjects recruited from a university city were well-educated, had relatively high incomes and were mainly “civil servants” or managers.

So the physical demands of their job were more like lifting things, walking or standing, or even the physical strain of sitting at a desk all day.

“If people perceive their job that their job requires excessive scope or effort – even if they don’t have a physical job worse,” it could lead them to describe their job as physically stressful, Dr. Burzynska explained.

The results of her study, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, run counter to the widely accepted benefits of exercise for brain health.

In fact, they go against the own work of Dr. Burzynska. Her previous research followed in the footsteps of other research and confirmed that aerobic exercise is good for the brain.

The new study is “ the first evidence that leisure health behaviors, such as physical activity and what we experience at work, have competitive associations with our [brain health],’ she says.

“We overlook the effects – if aerobic training helps your brain, do we think it every time [kind of] physical work will help the brain.

“Well, maybe not. That activity may not be aerobic, or for other reasons it may not have the same benefits as leisure time exercise.

In fact, her new study was responsible for that and, again, movement in downtime was not linked to memory problems or accelerated brain aging, measured by shrinkage in the hippocampus.

“If you find yourself in physical need, it may not be good for the brain,” said Dr. Burzynska.

Or maybe you experience physical exertion as unwanted, if not objectively difficult – that could be a reflection of lifestyle or health views we just haven’t captured.

“We need to dig deeper into what it means. Knowing how long we will stay on the labor market “- about 40 years -” I think it is very important to understand this. ‘