Why do we become ill from stress, and how do you treat and prevent such illness? Torbjörn Åkerstedt and his colleagues at the Stockholm Stress Center have been awarded a ten-year grant from FAS to find answers to questions such as these. Such long-term funding increases the possibility of bringing researchers together in really exciting collaborations, he says.
Stress-related illness is one of the major public health problems of our time and an enormous burden on the health insurance system. At the Stockholm Stress Center, researchers from different disciplines are working along multidisciplinary lines to find answers to the fundamental questions about stress and illness. What really happens when we become ill from stress? What treatments are effective in those who have become ill? And not least, how can we work preventatively to keep more people healthy?
“Stress research has often looked at the problem one small bit at a time,” says Torbjörn Åkerstedt, Professor at Stockholm University and Director of the Stockholm Stress Center. “We want to bring these aspects together to obtain a better overview. That is why the centre is gathering psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, neurophysiologists, immunologists, occupational medicine specialists and others to work together on these issues.”
The Stockholm Stress Center, established at the end of 2009, receives basic funding through a ten-year grant from FAS, the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, amounting to SEK 50 million in total.
“Perhaps the most important advantage of such long-term funding is that it creates entirely different opportunities for starting new collaborations,” comments Torbjörn Åkerstedt. “As a researcher, you often meet colleagues from other organisations and think ‘we should do something together’, but in most cases there are practical obstacles in the way – it’s rare for both parties to have time and money at the same time. But this grant makes it possible to bring together a number of people who should be collaborating, and this can often be very exciting. When we are able to combine immunology with the work of labour psychologists or the occupational health services, for instance – it’s most often in the crossing of such multidisciplinary divides that the major advances in research come about.”
You suddenly see new patterns and associations when you combine research from different disciplines, he explains. For instance that stress, fatigue and feeling ill are directly linked to each other through the signal systems of the body.
“Stress activates the immune system, and transmitter substances from the inflammatory part of the immune system also induce pronounced tiredness,” says Torbjörn Åkerstedt. ”These transmitter substances in the brain also regulate sleep and the need for sleep. And we already have findings from several studies showing that tiredness is the very most important factor for subjective health – in other words, how well or ill we feel on any given day. We find the pieces suddenly falling into place. We see a complex where stress apparently leads to disturbed sleep and increased physiological activation which in turn leads to tiredness, which leads to a feeling of illness, which then makes you go to the doctor.”
Among the first new research projects initiated under the framework of the Stockholm Stress Center are several studies on what is known as borderless work, in other words the phenomenon of mobile phones and the internet having erased the formerly clear line between work and leisure.
“We see the borderless society as the main cause of the rising stress levels we have observed in the 1990s and 2000s,” says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.
The centre is also conducting several studies on the association between sleep and stress.
“Despite recovery being such an important part of stress theory, stress research does not have a very nuanced view of recovery,” notes Åkerstedt. “For that reason we’re very interested in looking more closely at the role of sleep in this context, and what it is about recovery that makes us recover. This is one of the important questions we want to answer over this ten-year period.”
Text and photo: Anders Nilsson
FAS-centre funding: SEK5 million annually
For further information: www.stockholmstresscenter.se