Stress :: Stress measurement expert creates guide for researchers

Binghamton University Professor Gary D. James is hoping his new book will take the stress out of researching stress.

Offering guidance on topics ranging from the best ways to collect saliva and urine to working with special populations including pregnant women and the elderly, James expects that the book will help students and professionals design more effective field studies and models for stress measurement.

Working with a former student, Gillian H. Ice, on Measuring Stress in Humans: A Practical Guide for the Field, James? book focuses on non-invasive techniques that can be used outside the laboratory. He also hopes it will help researchers conceptualize what they want to study.

?As an anthropologist,? James said, ?I ask, ?Why mimic real life in a lab if you can measure people as they go about their day???

The book?s contributors, which include anthropologists and human biologists, all consider stress a dynamic process that happens in real life, James notes. And an integrated evaluation of that process makes the most sense to him. This sort of research may be in its infancy, but James already sees implications for doctors, health psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, among others.

James? background and experience in human stress research goes back to his days as a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. He worked on a portion of the Samoan Migration Project that focused on cultural transition and whether it?s stressful when people migrate to a more modern society. That was the first time he had to design a model for measuring stress.

?I had to develop a plan for how to do this,? he said, ?because at that juncture, nobody was doing it.?

Later, at what?s now the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, James was involved in some of the first research studies that made use of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. In these projects, subjects wear a blood pressure cuff attached to a small device that records readings taken every 15 minutes during a 24-hour period.

James has more recently turned his attention to the relationship between stress and cancer, and in particular, breast cancer. Genetics likely account for about 10 percent of breast cancer cases, and it is unknown what?s behind the other 90 percent. Since stress has been proven to affect immune function and there are known viral causes of cancer, he postulates that the stresses of everyday life may contribute to cancer development by altering immune function, exposing women to cancer-causing agents.

Collaborating with researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, James is looking at biological stress markers and whether they?re different for women who have family histories of breast cancer. Their research so far has found that endocrinological stress responses are indeed accentuated in women who have a mother or sibling with breast cancer.


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