Medically reviewed by Brian H. Wetchler, DO Key Takeaways Adrenal glands produce hormones that affect heart rate, blood pressure, and stress response.High cortisol levels can cause weight gain, ...

When people are under a lot of stress, the cortisol flattens out. For some people it goes down and others it goes up and stays up. For most people, cortisol, the vital hormone that controls stress, ...

Cortisol, often called the primary stress hormone, plays essential roles in metabolism, immune function, and your body’s response to threat. While appropriate amounts help maintain normal ...

Stress is a feeling most everyone experiences from time to time. In order to cope with these moments, days, months, years when they occur, the body responds by releasing a hormone called cortisol. But ...

What makes the human body so miraculous? Is it our comparatively large brain? Our versatile muscle system? Our exquisite vision and opposable thumbs? Although all these features are undeniably ...

For years, researchers have documented health differences between babies born vaginally versus by cesarean section—work that ...

The type of stress you face day in and day out can eventually develop into chronic stress, at which point it will begin to change your brain. In a TED-Ed video, “How Stress Affects Your Brain,” ...

Early life stress (ELS) and function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis predict later psychopathology. Animal studies and cross-sectional human studies suggest that this process might operate ...