Title: Stress and Cognitive Decline | HeartMath Institute
Headings: Stress and Cognitive Decline
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Stress and Cognitive Decline
Effects of Stress on Memory and Cognitive Functions
Keeping Your Brain Fit with Positive Emotions and HeartMath Techniques
Positive Emotions
How Stress Affects Heart Coherence
HeartMath Techniques
Alzheimer’s, Stress and the Decline in Memory and Other Brain Functions
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Content: A study out of the Netherlands published in 2007, The effects of cortisol increase on long-term memory retrieval during and after acute psychosocial stress, examined short- and long-term memory. Students were tasked with retrieving/recalling emotionally negative and neutral word associations in this study, which is referenced by the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information website. The 70 male participants learned some of the words one day before the tests and other words five weeks earlier. “Within the stress condition, retrieval of negative words, 5 weeks after learning, was impaired both during and after the stress task, compared to the control group,” the researchers wrote. A University of California, Irvine study, Mechanisms of late-onset cognitive decline after early-life stress, correlated memory dysfunction in young adult rats that experienced “early-life psychological stress” with humans. “ These findings constitute the first evidence that a short period of stress early in life can lead to delayed, progressive impairments of synaptic and behavioral measures of hippocampal function, with potential implications to the basis of age-related cognitive disorders in humans.” In another study, cited by Prevention magazine, German scientists conducted two separate experiments in which 60 participants were subjected to mild forms of emotional and situational stress. The results showed that “women who were stressed took 10% more time to recall recently learned information.” The reason, the article explained, is because the hormones, cortisol, often referred to as the stress hormone, and noradrenalin, flooded the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which controls working memory, where new information is processed and retained. “Our ability to focus, concentrate and remember has a lot to do with how much emotional stress we are experiencing,” write the authors of the book, HeartMath Brain Fitness Program, newly released. “