An official website of the United States government
There’s a lot to be stressed about in modern life — inequality, war, climate change, economic volatility, disease outbreaks — take your pick. Studying stress is a significant part of the research supported by NIA because stress critically influences health and well-being across the lifespan. How people respond and adapt to stressors can also tell scientists a lot about healthy aging and resilience .
With that in mind, we are spreading the word about some new and evolving resources that scientists studying stress can add to their research toolkits.
Proven tools and proper terminology
For 10 years, NIA has supported the Stress Measurement Network (SMN), with the goals of highlighting important conceptual dimensions of stress, providing a common terminology, and creating a toolbox of recommended stress measures. NIA encourages investigators to make use of, and contribute to, the network’s shared knowledge base.
The resources developed by the SMN illustrate several key points:
- Stress is not one thing; it’s multifaceted.
- In designing and reporting experiments, it’s important to distinguish between stress exposures (stressors) and stress responses.
- Stress exposures should be characterized by their temporal dimensions (duration, life stage); target (individual, community); and attributes (domain, severity, controllability).
- Stress exposures and stress responses impact and involve a range of systems — behavioral, psychological, social, and physiological.
- Careful stress measurement requires consideration of each measure’s purpose, properties, and the evidence of its validity.
NIA continues to work with the Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) Resource and Coordinating Center to upload the contents of the SMN’s toolbox into the SOBC Measure Repository . This repository is an interactive platform where behavioral measures can be identified, filtered for specific experimental contexts, and downloaded for use.
Better PubMed searches
Less visible, but perhaps even more impactful, are NIA-supported changes being made to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) system , with content expertise provided by the SMN. MeSH is the thesaurus for indexing all articles included in PubMed , the NLM’s search engine for biomedical research articles. MeSH search terms affect the quality and quantity of PubMed search results. NLM recently added many new stress-related terms to MeSH , expanding the types of stress exposures, stress responses, and stress measures, and allowing for more complete and precise searches of the biomedical literature. NIA recommends using terms from the updated SMN typology in future PubMed searches.
Reach out to us with questions!
NIA program officer Emily Hooker is taking over and expanding the BSR portfolio related to stress across the lifespan and the developmental origins of health and disease. Priorities include research on how early life adversity affects health trajectories across the lifespan, biopsychosocial mechanisms, and the study of potential ways to reverse the negative effects of stress.
If you are interested in the science of stress and want to dig deeper, email Emily , visit the NIA BSR home page , follow BSR on X , subscribe to our email newsletter , or leave a comment below.
Research Scientific Resources 2023-12-20T00:00:00Z