School of Biological Sciences, National Institute of Science Education and Research, Institute of Physics Campus, Sachivalaya Marg, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e43232. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0043232. Epub 2012 Sep 19.
Stress is perhaps easiest to conceptualize as a process which allows an organism to accommodate for the demands of its environment such that it can adapt to the prevailing set of conditions. Psychological stress is an important component with the potential to affect physiology adversely as has become evident from various studies in the area. Although these studies have established numerous effects of psychological stress on physiology, a global strategy for the correlation of these effects has yet to begin. Our comparative and systematic analysis of the published literature has unraveled certain interesting molecular mechanisms as clues to account for some of the observed effects of psychological stress on human physiology. In this study, we attempt to understand initial phase of the physiological response to psychological stress by analyzing interactions between innate immunity and metabolism at systems level by analyzing the data available in the literature. In light of our gene association-networks and enrichment analysis we have identified candidate genes and molecular systems which might have some associative role in affecting psychological stress response system or even producing some of the observed terminal effects (such as the associated physiological disorders). In addition to the already accepted role of psychological stress as a perturbation that can disrupt physiological homeostasis, we speculate that it is potentially capable of causing deviation of certain biological processes from their basal level activity after which they can return back to their basal tones once the effects of stress diminish. Based on the derived inferences of our comparative analysis, we have proposed a probabilistic mechanism for how psychological stress could affect physiology such that these adaptive deviations are sometimes not able to bounce back to their original basal tones, and thus increase physiological susceptibility to metabolic and immune imbalance.
压力可以被理解为一种过程，它使生物体适应环境的需求，从而适应当前的环境条件。心理压力是一个重要的组成部分，它有可能对生理产生不利影响，这一点从该领域的各种研究中已经很明显。虽然这些研究已经确定了心理压力对生理的许多影响，但还没有开始制定这些影响的全球策略。我们对已发表文献的比较和系统分析揭示了某些有趣的分子机制，这些机制可以解释一些观察到的心理压力对人类生理的影响。在这项研究中，我们试图通过分析文献中可用的数据，在系统水平上分析先天免疫和代谢之间的相互作用，来了解生理对心理压力反应的初始阶段。根据我们的基因关联网络和富集分析，我们已经确定了候选基因和分子系统，它们可能在影响心理压力反应系统方面具有某些关联作用，甚至可能产生一些观察到的终末效应（例如相关的生理障碍）。除了已经被接受的心理压力作为一种可以破坏生理平衡的干扰因素的作用之外，我们推测它还有可能导致某些生物过程偏离其基础水平的活动，一旦压力的影响减弱，它们就可以回到基础水平。基于我们比较分析的推导推论，我们提出了一个关于心理压力如何影响生理的概率机制，即这些适应性偏差有时无法恢复到其原始基础水平，从而增加了对代谢和免疫失衡的生理易感性。
