The concept of stress is familiar to everyone. Even in 1936, Hans Selye wrote in his study that stress is the flavor of life, and there is no our life without response to external and internal circumstances. Another thing is that now the negative experiences and excitement occur as the result of daily turmoil. The pace of life is accelerated, and more often we are in multitasking situations which is primarily due to the volume of information. It turns out that we are in a stressful condition when we acquire all the necessary information, and when we do not catch the information a stressful situation occurs as well.
High severe stress and heavy loads drain human resources. When a person is constantly in a stressful condition, various changes in the metabolism occur in his body. And at some point the processes that must occur in a predetermined pattern start to work in a different way because the feeling of excessive fear can cause a depression.
It is unlikely that this issue can leave anyone indifferent. The study of stress reactions and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is carried out by scientists all around the world, including in the South Ural State University. Doctor of Sciences (Medicine), Professor of the Department of Adaptive Physical Training, Physiology and Biochemistry Olga Borisovna Tseilikman has been exploring the problems of stress for 7 years and has defended her doctoral thesis on the topic: "Pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory hepatotrophic effects of chronical stress and the liver monooxygenase system." The research was presented by the Professor of SUSU together with the supervisor at international conferences. Their results were accepted and published in international journals.
“Of course, we would like to make our contribution to the doctrine of stress. Our research is carried out in non-stop mode. We experiment constantly, contact with our Moscow and foreign colleagues. In our research, we came to the fact that we have reason to form the concept of stress as a disease. And not just to form, but do it with an understanding of how to avoid it. And if the stress occurs, we need to decide how to help recover from it. And the help should be complex. For this there are all conditions for the development of our most ambitious plans in SUSU,” tells Olga Borisovna.
By the way, a maximum of 20% of people who are in stress suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. And as the scientists of SUSU found out, the susceptibility to such event is genetic.
“We will make great efforts to find genetic markers of susceptibility to PTSD. And this will help us in the future. Our research will result the situation when, for example, military vocational selection provide no ability of business trips for people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. And also, the research will be conducted in order to anyone know about his or her susceptibility and be informed. Now we don’t have such results, but we are coming close to this. Our main goal is to identify genetic susceptibility. It is possible that we will be able to determine the combination of genes, which often determines a painful reaction of people to stress,” says Olga Tseilikman.
The issue on post-traumatic stress disorder is so versatile, that it interested in and joined many scientists of the South Ural State University from different areas for the joint development of methods of stress correction. Thus, in one of the areas of her professional and research activities Doctor of Sciences (Engineering), Professor of the Department of Expertise and Quality Control of Food Production Irina Iurevna Potoroko has set her hands to the development of food manufacturing technology with unique properties of dietary food products for metabolic (non-pharmacological) stress correction. As Irina Iurevna says, they together with the colleagues from the Institute of Economy, Trade and Technologies of SUSU have long been involved in issues related to foodstuffs, which have been now transformed in time. This is due to the fact that not only approaches are used technologically but also food ingredients allowing the manufacturer to make products more attractive. And knowing, for example, what substances are contained in the products, it will be possible to say whether a certain person may consume some particular foodstuffs or not. Now scientists of the Institute of Economy, Trade and Technologies are searching for an approach that would allow influencing the properties of the raw material so as to not add any artificial ingredients, negatively affecting the body.
“Using our fields of knowledge, scientific achievements, interacting with other scientists all around the world, we can find approaches, which will allow us obtaining new products of so called specific purpose of human body and performing the certain improving functions in order to stimulate our body to the state of sustainability,” tells Irina Potoroko.
The study of the scientists of SUSU is recognized as a breakthrough area connected with the issues on longevity and will be presented in the framework of the Project 5-100 on the growth of competitive ability of Russian universities among the leading world scientific and educational centers.