Stress can be a factor for developing diabetes and autoimmune diseases

Over time, recurrent stress can trigger insulin resistance, hypertension, and abdominal fat deposition, researchers have found.

Stress is an instinctual adaptation to fight or flee when confronted with threats. Stress responses provide adaptation to various physical conditions including burns, bruises, bleeding or psychosocial traumas.

But when the situation becomes recurrent, stress can trigger diseases such as diabetes, depression, insulin resistance, hypertension, abdominal fat deposition and other autoimmune diseases, says Siegfried Miracle Lopez, chief of endocrinology at the Advanced Immunology Center in Hospital Angeles Lomas.

Type II diabetes is a disease caused by a systemic imbalance. The body is in a constant state called homeostasis,describing a balance between the external medium variants like the weather, temperature, light, night and such internal factors as blood pressure, heart rate, performance of the kidneys, liver, pancreas and lungs.

When an imbalance of homeostasis and angiostasis arises, (alteration in immune and hormone systems) and the body cannot adapt to it, disease can result. In the case of type II diabetes, the elevation of blood glucose is causing the stress.

It is very difficult to examine a disease without seeking the mechanism that originated it. Experiencing stress affects homeostasis, especially if it is constant and is the body doesn't have time to re-adapt and reach a neutral point of homeostasis. This situation is what generates disease conditions.

"Type II diabetes has immune, genetic and environmental components, and is a multifactorial disease. Therefore, in medical schools, we are no longer teaching diabetes as a disease but of a group of diseases characterized by glucose elevation, which causes inflammatory processes affecting the organs and immune system disorders that impair circulation, eyes and kidneys," explained the specialist.

For this reason, the chief of endocrinology at the institution emphasized that a current problem is overspecialization by medical doctors who study small parts of the body and individual organs, because the whole organism is very complex, and a fragmented study may lead to misdiagnosis.

"The problem is wanting to stay in our micro-universe specialty, missing the right diagnosis. Hence arises the need for a multidisciplinary team of several specialists such as neurologists, endocrinologists, urologists, psychologists, rheumatologists, oncologists , otolaryngologist, to analyze the case at the same time and achieve a better diagnosis and treatment," concludes Miracle Lopez.