"My name is Aoife O'Donovan.
I'm a Research Psychologist working at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
The San Francisco VA, where I'm based, has close ties to the University of California
in San Francisco.
My appointment is as Assistant Professor at UCSF.
Here at the VA I study post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic stress and their affects
on physical health.
I grew up on a farm in Ireland, and when I was growing up, one of the things that was
really important to my dad was that we wouldn't stress out the animals, because it would have
negative effects on their health.
In the case of the dairy cows on the farm, it would actually have negative effects on
the milk that they produced.
I grew up with the idea that psychological stress would affect biology, and then when
I started to study psychology, I realized we didn't know all that much about how psychological
stress affects biological systems and affects health.
Then I learned there was an area of psychology called health psychology, which has really
had a large focus on stress and biology, so I pursued training, and Masters, and PHD in
the area of health psychology.
I mostly have focused my research on how stress affects the immune system, and most recently
on how stress related changes and immune system activity affect mental health, affect the
brain, and affect physical health.
I'm based at the San Francisco Veteran's Affairs Medical Center, and so a lot of our work tends
to be focused on veterans.
These individuals have been exposed to a lot of severe traumatic stress.
That stress that involves threat to your life or a threat to your physical integrity, to
your physical well being.
When we're exposed to a stressful situation, our bodies respond very carefully to those
situations.
What they tend to do, what you feel in those situations is that your heart rate increases.
You might feel that your palms get sweaty.
But at a level below your level of awareness, the biological systems are responding to the
situation as well.
One system that's very responsive to these situations is the immune system.
Most of the time in our evolutionary past, when we experienced severe stress, it came
with higher risk for injury or infection, but nowadays, most of the stresses that we
experience, the psychological stresses, don't come with the same risk for injury and infection.
The response that we have, while it's very adaptive for our ancestors, may be less adaptive
now.
Some of those immune system changes have profound effects on our brain and also on the rest
of our bodily systems, can actually contribute to development, maybe, of post-traumatic stress
disorder, of depression, and also of physical diseases.
In a recent study, for example, we saw that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic
stress disorder had almost twice the risk for autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis,
lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and thyroiditis.
A major motivator behind the work that we're doing is that we want to develop better treatments
that might prevent or reduce some of the negative effects of severe stress exposure.
We may actually be able to target those effects using psychological treatments.
We have developed a mobile application for smart phones.
This is an app that we've created with support from UCSF, and the goal of the app is to administer
a type of training called ""attention bias modification training."" The goal of that
training is to reduce threat sensitivity.
We're specifically targeting this app at people with post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's very exciting to think that something that we all choose to do, play, may actually
benefit us in some way.
We ask people to engage with this training every day for two weeks, and all of our participants
so far have actually completed the program every day.
When people come back, people tell us they really enjoyed it, and it's just wonderful
to hear that.
Hopefully if and when the results support the training program, we could expand it out
and start targeting different aspects of brain function.
In our case, what we'll be doing is focusing on aspects of brain function that are affecting
negatively by stress.
There are two things I really love about my job as a scientist studying stress and the
immune system, that I get to work with a lot of really enthusiastic young people who are
also really excited about studying stress.
The other thing that's really fun on a day to day basis, is that I get to think about
problems that are really, the most interesting problems to me and try to figure out ways
to solve them, to uncover how stress affects health, and think about how we might come
up with better treatments for people who are exposed to stress.