Slim Body Blog

Small children who grow up in a family where the mother has psychological distress, the family is exposed to stress or is lacking social support, are at higher risk of developing anxious and depressive symptoms in early adolescence. Girls are more vulnerable than boys, and very timid or short-tempered children are more vulnerable than others […]

Real or perceived threats can trigger the well-known "fight or flight response" in humans and other animals. Adrenaline flows, and the stressed individual’s heart pumps faster, the muscles work harder, the brain sharpens and non-essential systems shut down. The whole organism responds in concert in order to survive.
At the molecular level, it has been widely […]

The number of U.S. service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder increased by nearly 50% from 2006 to 2007, according to Pentagon data released on Tuesday, the Washington Post reports. Nearly 40,000 soldiers who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 have been diagnosed by the military as having PTSD (Scott Tyson, […]

Anxiety may influence children’s metabolic health differently according to weight status, says a study presented in Indianapolis at the 55th Annual Meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). After examining the relationship between anxiety and the metabolic syndrome in boys, researchers presented preliminary evidence that treatment strategies geared towards overweight youth […]

A study published in JAMA reports that adults are
more likely to have posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms if they have
been abused as a child and have variations of a gene that is related to
stress response. The investigation was conducted by Rebekah G. Bradley,
Ph.D. (Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta) and colleagues.
Providing background information, the authors write: […]