Chronic stress in the workplace is becoming a very important problem in Canada, both in terms of health and economics. Although previous studies have used psychological questionnaires to assess stress in workers, we now know that these psychological questionnaires are of little help in trying to understand how stress 'gets under the skin' in workers, contributing to physical and mental health problems. In recent years, biomarkers of stress in saliva and blood have been developed and various studies have shown their efficacy at predicting physical and mental health problems in humans. However, to this day, no study has assessed factors that could differentially contribute to chronic stress in men and women in the workforce. Clearly, today's men and women in the workforce are faced with different challenges related to gender role and gender identity. These factors, along with biological differences in sex steroids in men and women could render them differentially vulnerable to the effects of chronic stress.

The main goal of this study is to thus perform the first Sex and Gender-Based study of chronic stress in men and women in the workforce.

In order to disentangle the effects of sex ( biological factors; sex steroids in men and women ) and gender ( gender role and identity ) on chronic stress in workers, we will measure biomarkers of basal, reactive and chronic stress in samples of saliva and blood in a population of 360 workers from a large hospital in the Montreal, Quebec region, and we will measure sex factors ( sex hormones ) and gender role and identity with various validated questionnaires.

By combining these sex and gender-based measures with factors associated with workplace ( job content, resources, etc. ) and family ( parental role, financial strain, etc. ) stress, we will provide the first set of scientific data determining the role of biological and psychosocial factors in contributing to chronic stress in men and women from the Canadian workforce.

Stress associated with caring for a mentally ill spouse can adversely affect the health status of caregivers and their children. Adding to the stress of caregiving is the stigma often placed against spouses and children of people with mental illness.

The goal of this study is to measure physiological markers of stress ( stress hormones measured in saliva samples ) as well as psychological markers of stress in spouses and children of patients suffering from mental health disorders and to compare these results to non-caregivers families and families with a member with cancer.

Comparison of physiological and psychological markers of stress in these different groups will allow to disentangle the impact of stigma against mental health disorders on chronic stress markers in caregivers and their children.

Le programme de recherche de la Dre Lupien tient compte des différences qu’entraînent le sexe et le genre dans la maladie mentale. Comme les études liées à la maladie mentale ont majoritairement été menées auprès d‘hommes, son travail vise à combler une lacune importante de la recherche en se penchant sur les différences sociales et biologiques entre les deux sexes. Il y a dans le programme de recherche de la Dre Lupien un important engagement envers l’application des connaissances. À cette fin, son Centre d’études sur le stress humain a pour mandat d’améliorer la santé physique et mentale des Canadiens en habilitant les gens au moyen d’information à base scientifique sur les effets du stress sur le cerveau et le corps.

We all know intuitively that stress can affect our memory. In recent years, scientific studies showed that stress can impact on our memory because when we are stressed, we secrete stress hormones that access the brain and impact on brain structures that are involved in learning and memory. Something else that we all know is that what is stressful for one person can be positively challenging for another person. This reflects the important individual differences in reactivity to stress in the human population. Interestingly, new animal studies show that reactivity to stress can have a genetic background. It has been found that mice lacking the apolipoprotein E ( ApoE ) gene are more reactive to stress than control mice, and are impaired in memory function. Further studies found that if these mice are exposed to a stressor, this reverses the impaired memory function these mice present. Altogether, these results suggest that there might exist a genetic predisposition for increased reactivity to stress.

Given that we know that stress can impair memory, the main goal of this study will be to determine whether older adults who present a different genetic background with regard to the ApoE gene are differentially affected when exposed to a stressor. We choose to study an older population because older adults have been shown to be more vulnerable to the negative effects of stress hormones on memory function, when compared to younger populations.

There exists an interesting paradox in the scientific literature pertaining to the association between the volume of the hippocampus ( a brain structure involved in memory function ), and memory performance in young and older adults. In older adults, small volumes of the hippocampus have been shown to be related to lower memory performance, while in young adults, small volumes of the hippocampus have been shown to be related to better memory perfomance. Two different mechanisms have been suggested to explain these different results in young and older adults. In young adults, smaller hippocampal volumes would be better for memory performance because they would represent adequate development. In older adults, smaller hippocampal volumes would be worst for memory performance because they represent age-related atrophy of the structure. Here, we proposed another interpretation. First, we suggest that these results are due to the environmental settings in which memory performance of older adults is assessed, and to the stress response that is triggered in older adults in response to this setting. We further suggest that natural variations in hippocampal volumes in both young and older adults may set the threshold for the impact of stress hormones on memory performance.

We will test this hypothesis in 170 young and older adults in whom memory performance will be assessed in conditions involving stress or no stress. We predict the presence of a positive association between hippocampal volume and memory in both young and older adults, only in conditions involving stress.

A previous CIHR funded grant from our team has shown that when older adults are tested for memory performance in clinical or scientific settings, this can lead to an important stress response in older adults and subsequent memory impairments. These results show that a certain proportion of « age-related memory impairments » reported in older adults is spurious, and induced by the testing environment ( and the stress response that goes with it ) to which we expose older adults when we test their memory performance.

The goal of this end-of-grant dissemination grant is to disseminate this result to scientists and their graduate students, older adults and their families, and clinicians around Canada in order to increase the care given to our senior citizens.

Using a three-phase programmatic dissemination plan, we will disseminate this knowledge to scientists and graduate students through a 1.5 day workshop, and we will then transfer this knowledge to older adults and their families. Through an interactive workshop, we will gather more information about factors inducing stress in older adults and this wealth of knowledge will then be written in a clinical guideline that will be disseminated to clinicians working with older adults across Canada ( through web-based interactive process ).

This result has important implications for clinicians and scientists assessing memory performance in older adults, as well as older adults themselves.

Journée scientifique sur les interactions cœur-cerveau en santé mentale organisée par la Centre de recherche Fernand-Seguin et l’Institut de cardiologie de Montréal | 7 mai 2010.

Des experts du Centre de recherche Fernand-Seguin de l’Hôpital Louis-H. Lafontaine et de l'Institut de Cardiologie de Montréal y présenteront les plus récents résultats concernant cette mystérieuse relation entre la cardiologie et la psychiatrie.Ce colloque constitue une activité de formation collective agréée conformément à la définition précisée dans le programme de Maintien du certificat du Collège royal des médecins et chirurgiens du Canada.

Résumé

Les recherches modernes en cardiologie et en neuropsychiatrie démontrent que le coeur est en relation avec notre cerveau. Toutefois la médecine a souvent négligé ce type de relation. Or, en cardiologie, on connaît bien l'association entre les troubles cardiovasculaires et la dépression. En psychiatrie, on observe l'association intrigante entre la prise de neuroleptiques de seconde génération, et le développement d'un syndrome métabolique. Depuis quelques années, des chercheurs, cardiologues, neurologues et psychiatres étudient la réaction au stress humain, décelée et caractérisée par la mesure des rythmes cardiaques et respiratoires. Ici, les mesures de réactivité physiologique nous permettent de caractériser la réponse au stress dans un contexte donné, mais nous renseignent également sur des dimensions difficilement observables par d'autres types de mesures telles la réaction à la douleur. Les données montrent encore une fois qu'il y a des liens coeur-cerveau, et que les modifications dans un système risquent d'endommager l'autre, avec parfois de graves conséquences pathologiques. La compréhension des troubles somatiques doit donc passer par l'union des domaines de la psychiatrie et de la cardiologie. La présente activité, innovatrice, vise à réunir des spécialistes provenant des milieux de la psychologie (Guay-Miller), de l'endocrinologie (Lupien) de la cardiologie (Tardif-D'Antono), de la psychiatrie (Lespérance-Stip) et de la pharmacologie (Rousseau) dans le but d'établir les premiers ponts entre la cardiologie et la psychiatrie, qui devraient mener à la mise sur pied de nouveaux projets alliant le domaine des neurosciences et de la cardiologie.