Stress may lead to skin diseases

Ottawa, October 28: If your hands remain busy all day, trying to keep the itching at bay, you need to look at your stress levels. Researchers from University of Medicine, Berlin and McMaster University in Canada have found a link between the brain and the skin.

The study revealed that stress may activate immune cells in the skin. The immune cells in skin can over-react and can lead to inflammatory skin diseases like atopic dermatitis and psoriasis.

Study leader Dr. Petra Arck termed the talk between stress and brain as the "brain-skin connection". She studied lab mice and found that immune cells destroy invading bacteria and drift into the skin in a big way in times of stress.

Dr. Arck's averred that small irritants could snowball into major stress and lead to itching. She said, “It's definitely chronic stress, and chronic stress to me is the accumulation of many acute (short-term) stressors. The daily hassles, basically: My neighbor upsets me, the household is too much. That kind."

When the mice were exposed to sound stress, a higher number of mature white blood cells were found in the skin. Dr. Arck's team also found that the proteins LFA-1 and ICAM-1 had a pivotal role to play in encouraging the inflammatory skin reaction.

The study appears in the November issue of The American Journal of Pathology.