Life stress and diminished expression of genes encoding glucocorticoid receptor and β <sub>2</sub> -adrenergic receptor in children with asthma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite evidence that stressful experience can exacerbate the symptoms of asthma, little is known about the biological mechanisms through which this occurs. This study examined whether life stress reduces expression of the genes coding for the glucocorticoid receptor and the beta(2)-adrenergic receptor. A total of 77 children were enrolled in the study (59% male; mean age, 13.5 years). Thirty-nine of them were physician-diagnosed with asthma, and 38 were healthy. After an in-depth interview regarding stressful experiences, leukocytes were collected through antecubital venipuncture, and real-time RT-PCR was used to quantify mRNA. Chronic stress was associated with reduced expression of mRNA for the beta(2)-adrenergic receptor among children with asthma. In the sample of healthy children, however, the direction of this effect was reversed. The occurrence of a major life event in the 6 months before the study was not sufficient to influence patterns of gene expression. When such events occurred in the context of a chronic stressor, however, their association with patterns of gene expression was accentuated. Children with asthma who simultaneously experienced acute and chronic stress exhibited a 5.5-fold reduction in glucocorticoid receptor mRNA and a 9.5-fold reduction in beta(2)-adrenergic receptor mRNA relative to children with asthma without comparable stressor exposure. These findings suggest that stressful experience diminishes expression of the glucocorticoid and beta(2)-adrenergic receptor genes in children with asthma. To the extent that it diminishes sensitivity to the antiinflammatory properties of glucocorticoids or the bronchodilatory properties of beta-agonists, this process could explain the increased asthma morbidity associated with stress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".