An article yesterday in Reuters Health by Amy Norton said that people who live with chronic distress through their lives might end up with a mild cognitive impairment, characterized by persistent memory difficulties, like forgetting names or misplacing things. Eventually it can evolve into advanced dementia. Nearly15 percent of older adults may have a mild cognitive impairment, which may develop into Alzheimer's disease.

Research at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago involving 1,256 older men and women, who didn’t have a mental impairment at the beginning of the study, were 40 percent more likely to become mildly impaired over a 12 year period, if they were prone to distress. Researchers believe that personality traits, like neuroticism, are fairly stable during a person’s life.

Because personality traits, including neuroticism, are believed to be mostly stable through life, a high score on the neuroticism scale is considered an indicator of how much mental suffering a person has had over the years. They aren’t certain why these people are more vulnerable to dementia and cognitive decline. However, researchers have seen changes in an animal’s brain, when it has been living under stressful conditions. Researchers were also able to lessen the animal’s distress using exercise and antidepressants.

The Encarta Dictionary, English (North America) edition describes distress as “mental suffering, for example, that is caused by grief, anxiety, or unhappiness. To make somebody extremely upset, anxious, or alarmed.”
Synonyms listed are “suffering, pain, sorrow, anguish, agony, grief, misery, concern, worry, upset, trouble, danger, difficulty, misfortune, afflict, torment.”

Finally, I know why I can no longer remember names, appointments or why I went upstairs! It was all those years of parenting children with reactive attachment disorder, passive aggressive disorder, bipolar disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, etc.

Each time a teenager ran away from home I felt sorrow, anguish, grief, concern, worry, upset, anxious, and alarmed. When our daughter painted feces on the walls, I felt the same way plus afflicted and tormented. When our daughter killed animals, I felt all of these and I worried that we had put our family in danger by adopting her.

What about staying up all night with an infant experiencing drug withdrawals or an asthma attack. Not to mention all the years of worrying about what the future holds for our medically fragile child or our learning disabled child. What about the concern, worry, anxiety, difficulty, and grief that can be involved in negotiating an Individual Education Plan (IEP) or a 504c Plan for school.

I really think they should conduct a new study beginning with pre-adoptive or pre-foster families. Then follow up after they have parented special needs children for five years and ten years, to see what effect the years of stress have had on their mental abilities.
SOURCE: Neurology, June 12, 2007.

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