A new study examined how feeling stressed from a young age can affect your health when you grow up.
It’s important because it shows that being stressed for a long time can lead to health problems like being overweight and having high blood pressure.
A research paper shared in the Journal of the American Heart Association talks about this. It says that young people who have been stressed since they were teenagers are more likely to have health issues like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes later in life.
Dr. Fangqi Guo, who led the study, says that understanding stress in kids is key to stopping or reducing these health problems in adults. Dr. Guo works at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles.
Health problems like being overweight, having Type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure are called cardiometabolic risk factors.
They often happen together and can cause heart diseases. These diseases were the main reason for nearly a quarter of all deaths in the U.S. in 2020.
A report from the American Heart Association in 2017 also said that bad experiences in childhood can affect your heart and metabolism throughout your life. Stress has been known for a while to contribute to these health issues.
The study looked at data from 276 people who were part of the Southern California Children’s Health Study. Their parents signed them up from 2003 to 2014 when they were about 6 years old.
These people then had health check-ups as teenagers and young adults, between 2018 and 2021. They were around 13 years old at the teenage check-up and 24 as adults.
At each check-up, they answered questions about how stressed they felt in the past month. The questions were from a common stress test called the Perceived Stress Scale.
For the youngest kids, their parents answered for them. The participants were put into four groups based on their stress levels: always high, going down, going up, and always low.
The researchers also checked the participants’ health. They measured blood pressure, weight, and how thick their neck arteries were to see how well blood was flowing.
They checked hemoglobin A1C levels, which tell us about blood sugar levels over a few months, to see if someone has diabetes.
They also measured body fat and checked if participants had a lot of fat around their belly, which is linked to a higher risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
They found that people who were stressed from their teenage years into adulthood were more likely to have high blood pressure, more body fat, especially around the belly, worse blood flow in their arteries, and a higher risk of being overweight.
Dr. Guo said that they knew stress and health were connected, but they were surprised by how clear the connection was across different health problems.
He suggests that health care professionals should use the Perceived Stress Scale during check-ups. This way, they can find people with high stress levels early and help them sooner.
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The research findings can be found in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
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