The Neurodegenerative Potential of Chronic Stress: A Link Between Depression and Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Modern lifestyle places individuals under increasingly greater loads of psychological and physical stress. Although the mechanisms that are triggered by stress are primarily adaptive to facilitate homeostasis, chronic stress can become maladaptive. Specifically, stress and its primary manifestation, glucocorticoid (GC) secretion, is strongly associated with neuronal atrophy/dysfunction, impaired cognition, and mood and affective disorders such as depression while a causal role of chronic stress in the etiopathology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been also suggested. Although cumulative evidence suggests a continuum between depres- sion and AD, and stress is suggested to play a detrimental role in both diseases, considerably less attention has been given to the suggested role of stress as a connecting risk factor.