Caffeine may reduce stress – but it won’t solve your problems

Coffee addicts are spoken communication it for years – currently Associate in Nursing experiment on mice has found that caffein will so facilitate one keep cool in trying things – and has pinpointed the neurochemical pathways involved in the process.

The researchers even recommend that the study might someday result in medical therapies for stress-related sicknesses in humans.

But the analysis itself is vital, we must not forget that stress is a normal human reaction to events rather than brain chemistry.

The last thing we need is another psychiatric drug that ignores the root of the problem. Previous analysis has shown variety of positive effects of caffein, for instance on preventing depression.

This study is that to uncover the organic compound pathways that modify caffein to install a number of the negative effects of stress on the brain.

Caffeine is known to inhibit receptors in the brain for the chemical adenosine. The researchers found that these receptors additionally managed the negative effects of chronic stress which stress-induced behaviour are often reversed by obstruction the receptors.

The results ar vital, as we do know that chronic stress affects people very badly. In mice, the (rather unpleasant) trying things during this experiment enclosed as damp bedding, sharing living space with others, food and water deprivation, cold baths and cages tilted at 45°.

And these poor mice unsurprisingly showed the behavioural and neurological consequences of this stress.

In humans, chronic stress can also have disastrous consequences. For example, my colleagues have shown that the economic crisis in the years between 2008 and 2010 can be blamed for as many as 1,000 people in the UK taking their own lives. We do, absolutely, have to be compelled to perceive however stress affects U.S.A.. And we positively have to be compelled to notice ways that to assist individuals (and mice) laid low with stress.

Handle with care

But I do have a nagging concern.

The paper suggests that a drug obstruction this explicit receptor may well be wont to treat sicknesses stemming from chronic stress like depression or anxiety. It’s this that I question.

While I don’t doubt that the study has disclosed one thing fascinating concerning however the brain responds to chronic stress, it’s a little less certain that the research tells us anything about “disorders”.

The mice appeared to respond unremarkably to Associate in Nursing abnormal – trying – state of affairs. It would be unfortunate to extrapolate that understanding to infer that such a response in a sign of abnormality, especially in humans.

Stressful events build U.S.A. stressed, emotionally and physically; they have negative cognitive, emotional, physical and behavioural consequences.

Given that we tend to method data within the brain victimisation neurotransmitters, it’s obvious that there will be a neurological route or pathway behind stress-induced behaviour.

It’s great to know more about that pathway – and maybe that will even help us become more resilient or recover faster from stressful life events.

Swerves and steering wheels

An analogy might help. If a driver swerves and crashes a car, we don’t usually regard the steering wheel as the “cause” of the crash.

The wheel was completely necessary (almost definitely the wheel was a necessary a part of the causative chain), but it didn’t “cause” the crash. OK, we can imagine a weird scenario where a fault in the steering wheel (grease on the grip, perhaps) might be to blame. But such scenarios are vanishingly rare. Essentially, the wheel is a part of a mechanism whereby the cause (the driver’s swerve) translates into the crash.

It’s fantastic that this research has been conducted. It’s genuinely important – and potentially useful. As a scientist and I believe passionately that knowledge (and depth of knowledge) can help us understand the full implications of the embodied human experience.

That includes understanding however the brain works and therefore the organic compound pathways of our response to fret. But it doesn’t essentially mean that these molecular pathways ar the “cause” of psychological distress. It’s probably better to think of them as enabling our normal human responses, not causing theisms.

This is important. The unfortunate tendency to label undesirable emotions as “symptoms” of “illness” may well cause us to treat people with less empathy than we should, to ignore the root causes of distress and to show to inappropriate medical treatments.