IMMUNOSUPPRESSION CAUSED BY EMOTIONAL STRESS: FROM ETIOLOGY TO PATHOGENESIS

Abstract

The lifestyle unleashes biological processes that lead the body to a mixed exhaustion, leading to a state called “stress”, getting sick or aggravating pathologies. The aim of this study is to analyze the emotional stress on the immune system and to develop a comprehensive concept that allows for fewer erroneous ramifications in its approach. This is a literature review based on articles in Immunology taken from the PubMed database. Articles that related the stressor problem with the immunopathogenic etiology, published between 2021 and 2022 (until March 16, 2022) and searched with the truncated terms “stress immunology”, “stress physiology” and “stress psychology” were selected. We evidenced that emotional stress is multifaceted, changes according to the nature of the stimulus, can be benign or deleterious and can affect populations of TCDs, which start to carry “scars” that make them hyper-responsive to inflammatory activities in stem cells, B and NK cells. Molecules such as mTOR and PI3K, which expose APCs viral agents, lead to the paucity of the process. In a situation contrary to stress, the pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-α tend to balance, improving coping with noxa. Stress can aggravate numerous conditions in biological systems. However, “positive” stress is responsible for learning, making the allostatic process less expensive. The cognitive condition and the stressful nature can influence better responsiveness and learning. We found that negative stress that raises glucocorticoid levels is cognitive-dependent, predicting the worsening of chronic pathologies or producing sequelae. Finally, we conclude that stress is all exogenous cause and effect that physiologically are neuroimmunoendocrine triggers of cognitive-dependent response, which allostatically lead the system to homeostasis by nature regardless of the cause of its damage, be it benign and/or deleterious, in the acute form of bioinformational character and in the immunopathogenic chronic form.

Keywords

• psychoneuroimmunology
• immunopathology
• psychopathology