Stress 'prevents better health'

Obesity causes serious health problems

Stress causes people to ignore health warnings, research suggests.

The results indicate getting people to eat more healthily and take exercise to tackle obesity and other conditions is harder if they have difficult lives.

This, scientists believe, is because a part of the brain responsible for memory is affected by increased stress levels.

Public health experts said politicians needed to intervene more to get home the public health message.

Professor Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University in the US ran experiments which subjected animals to repeated stress over a number of weeks.

The kind of interventions that have been tried in the past are not enough to shift the gap in health between the rich and poor Dr Harry Burns

This led to a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, shrinking.

This in turn leads to more of the stress hormone cortisol being produced which contributes to obesity, suppression of the immune system and hardened arteries.

He said: "If the hippocampus is smaller, you really can't keep track of the events in your daily life as efficiently."

White paper

The UK Government is producing a white paper on public health in the summer aimed at tackling diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and other conditions linked to bad lifestyle.

But the suggestion of a biological link to people not reacting to public health messages means Government interventions may have to be far greater than attempts such as improving housing.

Poor people are widely agreed to have higher stress levels and poorer health than more well off people, but the reasons behind this may now be more complex, the Rockefeller research suggests.

Dr Harry Burns, director of public health for the Greater Glasgow Health Board, said: "We have been very interested by the work of Professor McEwen for some time.

"We have concluded that the kind of interventions that have been tried in the past are not enough to shift the gap in health between the rich and poor."

He added: "It is becoming clear that this notion of giving people control of their lives again is very much at the centre of efforts to improve the disordered physiology that comes from poverty and deprivation."