This examining health inequities series is created as a part of being a student in Examining Health Inequities at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where I am challenged to examine health inequities and provide my own opinion.
Allostatic load adversely impacts a person’s health in a cycle that is challenging to break. Allostatic load consists of the combination of chronic stress and life events that is impacted by physiological systems. In an ideal world, people are able to effectively manage their life events and their physiological systems can work to maintain allostasis and regulate the body. Unfortunately, this is not a reality and people experience allostatic load everyday around the world.
All physiological systems of the body play a role in how someone responds to an allostatic load but the endocrine and immune systems appear to be the physiological systems most directly involved with allostasis and allostatic load. Allostatic load is typically created through one of four different stress patterns that impact the
physiological systems differently.
- Frequent stressors or “repeated hits” take form through someone receiving a stressful event on a repeating basis. This event could be seemingly small in nature, but the consistency and frequency can create a significant health impact.
- Lack of adaptation may follow a prolonged period of frequent stressors where the body’s physiological systems are struggling to adapt to a specific stressor.
- Prolonged response happens when the body is unable to turn off the physiological system that is attempting to respond. This may look like the body running at an elevated level for much longer than needed which could result in someone acting severely to a seemingly small and adverse event.
- Inadequate response is arguably the most impactful response due to the body’s systems no longer responding to the needs of their environment. This almost creates a “numb” or apathetic response by an individual which can be detrimental if the correct response would be closer to the need for “fight or flight”.
The causes of allostatic load have a lot of similarities to the Social Determinants of Health. The majority of causal factors for both of these are driven by non-medical events like where a person lives, what they eat, how they exercise, or other determinants of health. Unfortunately allostatic loads are oftentimes cyclical for a community and a person’s allostatic load may result in poor health outcomes that result in further allostatic loads that continue this vicious cycle.
Erik Angus 