How does stress cause the stomach to be upset and make all of those strange noises?
In: Biology
Actually, psychological stress could make your stomach more prone to developing peptic ulcer. I’ll elaborate.
Two most common causes of peptic ulcer are Helicobacter pylori infection and excessive use of nonsteroid antiinflammatory drugs. But it is the gastric acid that causes mucosal defects (ulcers), in normal circumstances (without H. pylori and NSAIDs) gastric mucosa has strong defence mechanism against aggresive gastric acid.
So peptic ulcer can happen because of two reasons:
1) there is more agressive factors helping gastric acid (H. pylori, NSAIDs) or
2) defence mechanisms against gastric acid are weakened (like in the case of psychological stress, i’ll explain).
So why stress? During the stress, our sympatethic system is activated and because of it, blood flow is increased in organs that you need to survive (fight or flight mechanism), like your heart and muscles. Blood flow is reduced to organs that you “don’t need” at that moment, like your stomach, intestines, kidneys.
When blood flow is reduced to stomach, stomach lacks nutrients and stuff it needs for it’s defence mechanism to properly work.
Surely, this could not happen in short lasting stress, but it happens in people who are chronically under the stress.
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