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Book: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
Quotes of Book: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:
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  1. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    Major depression. As will be detailed in chapter 14, major depression is utterly intertwined with prolonged stress, and this connection includes elevated glucocorticoid levels in about half the people with major depression. Yvette Sheline of Washington University and others have shown that prolonged major depression is, once again, associated with a smaller hippocampus. The more prolonged the history of depression, the more volume loss. Furthermore, it is in patients with the subtype of depression that is most associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels where you see the smaller hippocampus.
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  2. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    Beginning in the early 1980s, various researchers, including myself, showed that this "glucocorticoid neurotoxicity" was not just a pharmacological effect, but was relevant to normal brain aging in the rat. Collectively, the studies showed that lots of glucocorticoid exposure {in the range seen during stress} or lots of stress itself would accelerate the degeneration of the aging hippocampus. Conversely, diminishing glucocorticoid levels {by removing the adrenals of the rat} would delay hippocampal aging. And as one might expect by now, the extent of glucocorticoid exposure over the rat's lifetime not only determined how much hippocampal degeneration there would be in old age, but how much memory loss as well.
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  3. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    Something roughly akin to love is needed for proper biological development, and its absence is among the most aching, distorting stressors that we can suffer.
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  4. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    What Wilkinson and others have shown is that poverty is not only a predictor of poor health but, independent of absolute income, so is poverty amid plenty-the more income inequality there is in a society, the worse the health and mortality rates.
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  5. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    Interestingly, traumatic stress early in life {abuse, for example} greatly increases the risk of IBS in adulthood. This implies that childhood trauma can leave an echo of vulnerability, a large intestine that is hyperreactive to stress, long afterward.
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  6. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variables such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity.
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  7. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    What the data show: the fewer social relationships a person has, the shorter his or her life expectancy, and the worse the impact of various infectious diseases. Relationships that are medically protective can take the form of marriage, contact with friends and extended family, church membership, or other group affiliations.
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  8. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    It is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, stress increases the risk of your defenses being overwhelmed by the disease.
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  9. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    Neuropsychologists are coming to recognize that there is a specialized subset of long-term memory. Remote memories are ones stretching back to your childhood-the name of your village, your native language, the smell of your grandmother's baking. They appear to be stored in some sort of archival way in your brain separate from more recent long-term memories. Often, in patients with a dementia that devastates most long-term memory, the more remote facets can remain intact.
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  10. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine-in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethnicity and you want to make some predictions about who is going to live how long, the single most useful fact to know is each person's SES.
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  11. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    A major depression, these findings suggest, can be the outcome of particularly severe lessons in uncontrollability for those of us who are already vulnerable. This may explain an array of findings that show that if a child is stressed in certain ways-loss of a parent to death, divorce of parents, being a victim of abusive parenting-the child is more at risk for depression years later. What could be a more severe lesson that awful things can happen that are beyond our control than a lesson at an age when we are first forming our impressions about the nature of the world?
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  12. Robert M. Sapolsky _ Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

    As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it-cognitively distorting how the world works.
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