The Poison of Stress and the Middle-East

After reading articles like this (or this or this or this), I can't help but wonder what's happening to the brains of Iraqis, Palestinians, Israelis and Lebanese. After all, neuroscience now knows that chronic stress is toxic. When your brain is constantly suffused with stress hormones (usually glucocorticoids), neurons die and aren't replaced. Dendritic growth slows down. You have fewer synaptic proteins. Your hippocampus begins to wither and shrink. Even if you are just a baby in your mother's belly during the war, you are still born with reduced levels of neurogenesis.

The worst part of all is that chronic stress tends to leave lasting scars. Elizabeth Gould and her post-doc Christian Mirescu did a simple experiment in which they deprived newborn rats of their mother for either 15 minutes or three hours a day. For an infant rat, there is nothing more stressful. Earlier studies had shown that even after these rats become adults, the effects of their developmental deprivation linger: They never learn how to deal with stress. As Mirescu told me when I visited Gould's lab earlier this year,"Normal rats can turn off their glucocorticoid system relatively quickly. They can recover from the stress response. But these deprived rats can't do that. It's as if they are missing the 'off' switch." In other words, their stressful childhood meant that the rats were never able to effectively deal with the normal stressors of life. While most rats eventually learned how to properly evaluate threats, these rats were freaked out by everything.

That's some scary data. It demonstrates that stress can easily become a downward spiral, as an increased exposure to stress makes us increasingly unable to cope with it. Is this what's happening to the citizens of the Middle East? Is the endless war warping their brain? Is violence a positive feedback loop?

Some enterprising scientist should study the hippocampuses of Baghdad residents...