Massage benefits are more than skin deep

Reprinted from the New York Times (www.nytimes.com). (link to original article at bottom of page)

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Published: September 20, 2010

Does a good massage do more than just relax your muscles? To find out, researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles recruited 53 healthy adults and randomly assigned 29 of them to a 45-minute session of deep-tissue Swedish massage and the other 24 to a session of light massage.

All of the subjects were fitted with intravenous catheters so blood samples could be taken immediately before the massage and up to an hour afterward.

To their surprise, the researchers, sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine , a division of the National Institutes of Health, found that a single session of massage caused biological changes.

Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisol in blood and saliva, and in arginine vasopressin, a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.

Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol.

The study was published online in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
The lead author, Dr. Mark Hyman Rapaport, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai, said the findings were “very, very intriguing and very, very exciting — and I’m a skeptic.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 21, 2010, on page D6 of the New York edition.

Online edition link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/health/research/21regimens.html?_r=1

Work Related Stress Can Kill

Very compelling evidence how everyday stress at work can not only make you miserable, it can also kill you. (May I suggest massage therapy for some stress relief?)

LONDON (Reuters) – (Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Caroline Drees)

Work really can kill you, according to a study on Wednesday providing the strongest evidence yet of how on-the-job stress raises the risk of heart disease by disrupting the body’s internal systems.

The findings from a long-running study involving more than 10,000 British civil servants also suggest stress-induced biological changes may play a more direct role than previously thought, said Tarani Chandola, an epidemiologist at University College London.

“This is the first large-scale population study looking at the effects of stress measured from everyday working life on heart disease,” said Chandola, who led the study. “One of the problems is people have been sceptical whether work stress really affects a person biologically.”

Heart disease is the world’s leading cause of death. It is caused by fatty deposits that harden and block arteries, high blood pressure which damages blood vessels, and other factors.

The researchers measured stress among the civil servants by asking questions about their job demands such as how much control they had at work, how often they took breaks, and how pressed for time they were during the day.

The team conducted seven surveys over a 12-year period and found chronically stressed workers — people determined to be under severe pressure in the first two of the surveys — had a 68 percent higher risk of developing heart disease.

The link was strongest among people under 50, Chandola said.

“This study adds to the evidence that the work stress-coronary heart disease association is causal in nature,” the researchers wrote in the European Heart Journal.

Behaviour and biological changes likely explain why stress at work causes heart disease, Chandola said. For one, stressed workers eat unhealthy food, smoke, drink and skip exercise — all behaviours linked to heart disease.

In the study, stressed workers also had lowered heart rate variability — a sign of a poorly-functioning weak heart — and higher-than-normal levels of cortisol, a “stress” hormone that provides a burst of energy for a fight-or-flight response.

Too much cortisol circulating in the blood stream can damage blood vessels and the heart, Chandola said.
“If you are constantly stressed out these biological stress systems become abnormal,” Chandola said.

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Caroline Drees)

Original article Study finds work-related stress can kill by Michael Kahn Tue Jan 22, 8:24 PM ET published on Reuters.com.