Immunosuppression Caused by Emotional Stress: From Etiology to Pathogenesis

Introduction: The economic, technological and institutional transitions that took place in the last decade had repercussions on the way these varied demands were managed; due to the increase in competitiveness, a phenomenon which has been reproducing in a geometric way. All this dynamics takes the organism out of its homeostatic state, degrades health and generates a high energy cost to the health system. It exposes us to emotional situations that change our physiology, and lead us to illness and our interest is in this doubt. Methods: This is a narrative literature review based on scientific articles in Immunology, from the database: PubMed. Only articles that better connected the problem of the stressor stimulus with the immunopathogenic etiology were chosen. Within the period 2021 and 2022, until March 16, 2022. Searched with truncated terms “stress immunology, “stress physiology” and “stress psychology”, in English Results: We evidence that emotional stress has a multifaceted etiology that changes according to the nature of the stimulus; benign or deleterious affecting T cell levels CD3+, CD4+, CD8+ as they change CNS health, and carry informational traces due to stress making them more responsive to antigen and inflammatory stem cells, B cells and NK cells. When exposed to situations of well-being, they lead inflammatory agents such as IL-1β, TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-10 to balance, increasing and improving coping with the disease. Conclusion: Negative stress can aggravate numerous conditions in mammalian biological systems, especially humans. However, 'positive' stress is responsible for learning, commitment, personality formation. On the other hand, the cognitive condition and the stressful nature can both influence the best immune responsiveness, and learning. So yes, stress of a negative nature, which raises the levels of glucocorticoids, is cognitive-dependent and predictors of the worsening of pathologies when their nature is chronic. Thus, stress is: All exogenous cause and effect that physiologically are neuroimmunoendocrine triggers of cognitive-dependent response that allostatically cause the body to enter homeostasis by the nature of its cause of its damage, be it benign or deleterious, in the acute form of biocharacter -informational in the immunopathogenic chronic form