Dr. Shilpa Sayana explains how chronic stress keeps cortisol and adrenaline elevated, raising blood sugar and insulin to fuel inflammation and autoimmune disease. Having one autoimmune condition triples your risk of developing another. Functional medicine aims to reverse early markers before they progress.
Is your stress hormone somehow too high or just kind of burnt out and too low? And usually that happens due to exactly what Serena said. Chronic stressors, such as just juggling many balls at one time, which is so common with most of our patients right now. And just genetically, we're not wired to be taking care of so many things at the same time. And it's almost like you're running from a tiger all the time. And if you're running from that tiger, there's a constant increase in your adrenaline or your stress hormone. And. And either you get eaten or you get saved. And that cortisol has time to come down. But in our current modern life, it's constant. The cortisol that gets spilled out. And so your blood sugar goes up, your insulin goes up. And this, in essence, is a chronic inflammatory canvas that you're building on. And once you have one autoimmune condition or one autoimmune marker, the likelihood of having the next one is three times higher. So in functional medicine, what we do is we really try and reverse your first autoimmune marker, even if you're not having many symptoms, so we can really prevent the autoimmune disease from spreading.
