DGIST announced on July 2 that Professor Seong-Woon Yu's team in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences discovered that chronic stress causes autophagic death of adult hippocampal neural stem cells (NSCs).
However, the exact mechanisms underlying damages of brain functions have not been well known yet.
While the previous animal studies found that generation of new neurons is much less in stressed mice, apoptosis1, a well-known cell suicide pathway was not found in NSCs, leading to a conclusion that cell death is not related with loss of NSCs during stress.
Professor Yu's team discovered for the first time that chronic stress causes autophagic death of adult hippocampal NSCs.
Autophagy (self-eating in Greek) is a cellular process to protect cells from unfavorable conditions through digestion and recycling of inner cell materials, thereby cells can remove toxic or old intracellular components and get nutrients and metabolites for survival.
However, autophagy can turn into self-destruction process under certain conditions, leading to autophagic cell death.
Employee Assisted Program or EAP is a part of the HR policy adopted by some companies for the welfare of their employees that helps them manage day to day as well as chronic stress.
A recent study conducted by Optum (2016) found that 46% of the workforce in India is facing some or other form of stress.
Eliminating the stress related to a job may not be possible however steps can be taken to manage it.Read more at - https://tinyurl.com/yuedkvma
