Stress in early life reduces life expectancy - and that of partners

A new study from the University of Glasgow, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggests that our expectancy is likely to be strongly affected by how much stress we were exposed to early in our lives. And worse still, the study also shows that early life stress experienced by our mates could also be affecting how long we are likely to live. The study, conducted by a team led by Professor Pat Monaghan, use a small bird, the zebra finch. The way in which the body responds to stress is essentially the same in all the higher vertebrate including humans and zebra finches, like humans, also form strong bonds with their mates. The researchers imitated a stressful environment by giving half of the birds in the study a natural dose of stress hormones for a two week period when they were chicks, while the other half were not dosed. After this, all the birds were kept in the same stress-free environment until they became adults. Their greater exposure to stress in early life made the exposed birds more reactive to stress when they became adults - they reacted much more than the 'laid-back' birds who had not been given the stress hormones in early life.