Ireland is in the middle of an epidemic of stress-related disorders and people are going to need to take medication to counteract the long-term effects of stress, according to an Irish neuropharmacologist. Michelle McDonaghreports.
Dr John Cryan said various pharmaceutical companies are in the early stages of research and development into drugs specifically geared towards combating stress.
Depression and anxiety disorders are stress-related disorders, but Dr Cryan said antidepressants and anxiety medications are not geared towards modulating the stress response.
"Chronic stress is on the increase in Ireland. I lived abroad for a number of years and returned to find the country in an epidemic of dealing with stress-related disorders. I think people are going to need medications to counteract some of the long-term effects of stress, especially at the brain level," he explained.
Dr Cryan is a senior lecturer in the School of Pharmacy and Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at University College Cork (UCC). He is also a principal investigator in the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at UCC, where he is involved in exploring the brain-gut link.
His research is focused on the neurobiological and behavioural consequences of stress and how therapeutic drug treatments can modify them. He has won numerous awards for his research and has published more than 60 scientific papers on this topic.
He will deliver the next of the Faculty of Science public lecture series at UCC tomorrow night on the topic Getting on Your Nerves: Stress and the Brain - From Disease to Drugs.
Dr Cryan said that for certain susceptible individuals, the effects of stress may be life threatening, therefore research focused on understanding how the body, and in particular the brain, deals with stress is of great importance.
In his lecture, Dr Cryan will discuss how recent advances in neuroimaging, molecular genetics and physiology are shedding new light on the impact of stress on nerve cells and brain circuits. This may offer novel avenues for developing pharmacological interventions to treat stress-related disorders, including major depression, anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome.
He commented: "Stress has become part of all of our daily lives but the change from short-term exposure to stress to chronic exposure can have a deleterious effect on brain function. The hippocampus is the region of the brain that plays a very key role in regulating stress response, it is involved in learning and memory.
"A slew of research now shows that following chronic stress, this region can get changes in function which leads to a whole range of emotional and psychiatric disorders."
More recently, other brain regions regulated by the hippocampus, such as parts of the cortex, have also been shown to be very important in terms of regulating stress response.
Dr Cryan said the three main stress-related disorders are depression, anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome, and subjecting people to certain levels of stress at different points in their lives can predispose them to these conditions. "Many people don't think about the effect of stress on the gut but the brain can have a very big impact on how the gastrointestinal tract works.
"We are doing a lot of work on the important importance of the brain in gut function," he said.