Exploring the Pathogenic Role of Stress in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and its Management

Abstract

Every organism is constantly adapting to changes happening in the environment.  This adaptation helps in maintaining homeostasis.  All organisms must adapt at molecular, cellular, physiological, and behavioral levels.  Amongst many factors which act as a threat to homeostasis, one of them is stress.  The organism has to bring about both physiological and behavioral changes.  The various researches in recent years have shown that adverse life events, along with chronic stress, and depression leads to increased likelihood of relapse in patients with quiescent IBD. Many studies of experimental stress in animal models of colitis support this. Till date, the therapeutic successes of stress reduction therapies have not been explored largely.  This is also due to methodological difficulties in going ahead with such studies.  This paper tries to explore the recent researches in enhancing our understanding of the pathogenic role played by psychological stress in inflammatory bowel disease and focuses our attention on the need for controlled studies on the curative prospective of stress reduction therapies for IBD.