Stressed-out brains don’t flex well

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Stress is your way of life, you’re juggling tasks like a circus act, and you think you’re operating at peak capacity? Think again, says yet another study on the effect of stress on the brain -- this one from New York’s Weill Medical College at Cornell and Rockefeller University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This one has the brain scans to prove it, and a bit of good news too: chill out for a month (is this possible?) and your brain will recover the agility it loses when stress becomes chronic.

Banishing -- or at least minimizing -- stress is an excellent resolution for this still-new year. The people who put out the highly regarded Harvard Medical School Health Newsletters have added a new Portable Guide to Stress Relief, which comes with some handy tips.

This study put 20 medical students about to take board exams in the coming months -- all of them acknowledging being stressed out -- into a functional MRI, which measures the flow of blood in the brain in response to different tasks assigned by researchers. The researchers compared the performance and the brain’s function of the 20 stressed-out medical students with a control group of similarly aged and rested subjects who were not stressed out. When put to two tasks that measured the ability to shift attention and then to shift back, the stressed-out medical students performed far worse than their relaxed counterparts.

The brains of the stressed gave the inside story: During the attention-shifting task they were assigned, activity in their prefrontal cortices -- the seat of such ‘executive functions’ as attention, task-planning and judgment -- was far lower than that of the non-stressed out. And connectivity between that area and other regions of the brain with which it works to translate thought into action was diminished too.

But a month after the exams were over, the same group of med students -- more relaxed now -- came and did the tasks again in the scanner. Their ordeal over and a period of relaxation behind them, and their performance -- and brain scans -- looked pretty much like those of the relaxed control group had.

Next up for the researchers: using the same methods to see how men and women handle stress differently -- a favorite topic of this L.A .Times blogger. Stay tuned!

-- Melissa Healy