DASHing Through Our Minds

In today’s day and age, the importance of how everyday stressors impact our minds is growing. Regardless of who, and what we have encountered, everything brings a certain degree of stress. Nonetheless, the real question is do stress hormones help us or hurt us?

Honestly, not many people are sure.

As a result, Dr. Heather Abercrombie and her team began the DASH (Depression, Adversity, & Stress Hormones) study to investigate how stress hormones and early life experiences contribute to depression in women.

Dr. Abercrombie is a Clinical Psychologist as well as an Associate Professor in the UW Department of Psychiatry. Despite her beginnings as a philosophy major, career opportunities in therapy easily won over her interests. Following her graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her fellowship at Stanford University, Dr. Abercrombie began to dive into research. Specifically focusing on the biological components of stress, learning, and depression. Henceforth leading to the DASH study and her interest in memory function. The main actor of the study was the cortisol hormone, often known as the “stress hormone”. Cortisol releases energy and activates sensors in our brains that allow us to cope with stressors.

“A common misconception,” Dr. Abercrombie notes, “is that elevated levels [of cortisol] cause stress. It’s instead like the firefighter that turns off the stress alarms and puts out fire. Stress itself is the alarm that is caused by the brain [when one encounters a stress inducing situation, a.k.a. our fire].”

In the DASH study, the lab had a sample of women who were and weren’t experiencing feelings of depression to first see if cortisol could help alleviate these feelings. For the main reason being that having a cortisol insensitivity is associated with depression. To simplify the concept, Dr. Abercrombie says, “Type 2 diabetes is a condition where there is enough insulin circulating but the cells don’t recognize or use it, [similarly] with depression there’s plenty of cortisol circulating but the cells don’t utilize it.”

To test this, the women were given a pill of either hydrocortisone or a placebo to elevate their cortisol levels. Hydrocortisone is a synthetic version of cortisol that is widely available in many over-the counter drugstore products like creams and ointments. And in this case, a pill. Shortly after, the women then undergo two brain scans during which they are shown several pictures. Then, two days later, the women complete an emotional memory task where they are asked to recall the pictures they were shown.

This recall allows for the researchers to examine the effects of cortisol and the placebo on the women’s negative memory bias.

Negative memory bias, also known as the negativity effect, is the belief that things of more negative nature have a greater effect on one’s mental state and processing than neutral or positive things. The significance of negative memory bias is its link to cortisol. Cortisol has a potent effect on one’s learning and memory, and in certain situations, it can even boost or impair it. Consequently, the researchers hypothesized that increasing cortisol would decrease the bias.

In this case, across the sample set, cortisol did decrease negative memory bias in individuals with a known insensitivity to cortisol. In fact, it was found that cortisol seemed to normalize activity in brain regions that are related to emotion regulation and interaction with one’s environment. However, simply increasing cortisol chronically won’t alleviate depression. Mostly because of the complexity of the HP axis.

The HP axis is the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that is an elaborate intertwining of our central nervous system and endocrine system. As a result, increasing cortisol levels will only acutely, or shortly, mitigate symptoms/ feeling of depression. Nonetheless, Dr. Abercrombie and her team are hopeful about the future.

“Cortisol dysfunction has been studied for at least 50 or more years, but it still remains elusive as to what the problem is,” Dr. Abercrombie muses.

We might not have discovered what the problem is, but we have found a launch pad into future studies where we can “mirror” the DASH study and further cortisol elevations and the possibility of buffering one’s emotional response to a stressor.

We’ve simply found the key to open the front door to a world of possibilities.