SELYE’S SYNDROME

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Selye was the first scientist to identify ‘stress’ as underpinning the nonspecific signs and symptoms of illness. The stress concept re-entered Selye’s life during his fellowship at McGill when Prof Collip placed him in charge of identifying various female sex hormones that were yet undiscovered. For this project, he collected cow ovaries for processing and examination, and injected various extracts into female rats and measured their responses. His autopsies yielded a triad of surprising findings: enlargement of the adrenal glands, atrophy of the lymphatic system including the thymus, and peptic ulcers of the stomach and duodenum. It was not due to a hypothetical new hormone, as every injected noxious agent produced the same findings. He continued his experiments by placing the rats in various stressful situations, such as on the cold roof of the medical building, or the familiar revolving treadmill that required continuous running for the animals to stay upright. The findings in each experiment were the same: adrenal hyperactivity, lymphatic atrophy and peptic ulcers. Selye recognised that his discovery was an expression of Claude Bernard’s milieu intérieur and homeostasis at work, and cleverly linked the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis to the way the body coped with stress.

Selye’s proposal stipulated that stress was present in an individual throughout the entire period of exposure to a nonspecific demand. He distinguished acute stress from the total response to chronically applied stressors, terming the latter condition ‘general adaptation syndrome’, which is also known in the literature as Selye’s Syndrome. The syndrome divides the total response from stress into three phases: the alarm reaction, the stage of resistance and the stage of exhaustion. When individuals are exposed to a stressor, they are at first taken off guard, then attempt to maintain homeostasis by resisting the change, and eventually fall victim to exhaustion in countering the stressor. Stress is a choreographed state of events, not a mere psychological term, and is encountered by all individuals during a period of illness. It differs fundamentally from the fight-or-flight or acute stress response that occurs when facing a perceived threat, as first described by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915. The acute release of neurotransmitters from the sympathetic and central nervous systems, as well as hormones from the adrenal cortex and medulla, pituitary and other endocrine glands, mediate the response in acute stress.

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