Chronic stress also causes pathological problems that extend beyond the realm of affective disorders. For example, there is a wealth of data linking chronic stress to age-related neurodegeneration and cognitive decline, likely mediated by glucocorticoid hypersecretion (see Lupien et al., 1999; Landfield et al., 2007). Chronic stress is also linked to somatic pathologies, including cardiovascular disease (see Steptoe and Kivimaki, 2012) and the metabolic syndrome (see Tamashiro et al., 2011), among others. Indeed, accumulating evidence suggests that stress has broad impact on virtually all physiological systems, with glucocorticoids serving as a contextual signal that is superimposed atop specific cellular processes.
