Allostatic Load as a Correlate of Aging

Allostatic load is the concept of wear and tear on the body that emerges from stresses via overactivation of the neuroendocrine system. Causative stresses can range from starvation to psychological stress to a high burden of age-related dysfunction. At some point reactions to stress that are compensatory tip over into being themselves damaging. Thus one could expect allostatic load to correlate with degenerative aging and risk of mortality to at least some degree. In practice, however, there is little agreement on how to measure allostatic load, particularly in human patients, which makes it hard to compare results from study to study, and hard to form a unified body of work from the research on the topic. Allostatic load (AL) refers to the activation of physiological regulatory systems in response to chronic stress and the long-term effects on the body and brain. AL reflects cumulative, multisystem physiological dysregulation, which is the result of repeated cycles over the lifespan in response to stressful life evens events. A literature review of AL and health reported that older and disadvantaged groups exhibited a higher risk of high AL. The primary mediators of AL include stress hormones and cytokines that influence the secondary outcomes of systematic dysregulation of metabolic, cardiovascular, and second-order inflammatory biomarkers over time. Importantly, adults aged over 40 years old had a more than 2-fold higher risk of high AL than adults aged 18-...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs