How stress can cause a fever

[Andy]

You are about to take the stage to speak in front of a large audience. As you wait, your heart starts to pound, your breathing quickens, your blood pressure rises and your palms sweat. These physiological responses are evolutionarily conserved mechanisms to prepare your body to fight against imminent dangers, or to run away quickly. Another key response is an increase in body temperature. Emotional stress can cause this psychogenic fever in many mammalian species, from rodents to humans1,2. What is the neural mechanism that underlies this phenomenon? Writing in Science, Kataoka et al.3 describe a key neural circuit in psychologically induced hyperthermia.

The current work builds on a long legacy of research by the same group, who began their quest for a neuronal circuit that triggers heat production in 2004, using brown fat tissue as an entry point4. Brown fat is a type of ‘good’ fat that can generate heat when needed. Blocking the activity of β3-adrenergic receptor proteins, which are abundant in brown fat and enable the tissue to respond to signals from neurons, attenuates stress-induced hyperthermia5.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00873-0

 

[Trish]

This seems to be the paper the article is based on:
A central master driver of psychosocial stress responses in the rat Naoya Kataoka et al

A major psychosocial stress circuit
Psychological stress induces various physiological responses by activating the sympathetic nervous system. The brain circuits involved in these functions are still not completely understood. In a rat model, Kataoka et al. combined anatomical tracing, immediate early gene expression analysis, pharmacology, optogenetics, electrophysiology, and genetic cell ablation to provide evidence for the prominent role of a ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex in sympathetic responses to social defeat stress. This brain region sends excitatory projections to the dorsomedial hypothalamus as a central coordinator of the psychosocial stress responses. This pathway is crucial for understanding how psychosocial stress influences a variety of body functions.

Science, this issue p. 1105

Abstract
The mechanism by which psychological stress elicits various physiological responses is unknown. We discovered a central master neural pathway in rats that drives autonomic and behavioral stress responses by connecting the corticolimbic stress circuits to the hypothalamus. Psychosocial stress signals from emotion-related forebrain regions activated a VGLUT1-positive glutamatergic pathway from the dorsal peduncular cortex and dorsal tenia tecta (DP/DTT), an unexplored prefrontal cortical area, to the dorsomedial hypothalamus (DMH), a hypothalamic autonomic center. Genetic ablation and optogenetics revealed that the DP/DTT→DMH pathway drives thermogenic, hyperthermic, and cardiovascular sympathetic responses to psychosocial stress without contributing to basal homeostasis. This pathway also mediates avoidance behavior from psychosocial stressors. Given the variety of stress responses driven by the DP/DTT→DMH pathway, the DP/DTT can be a potential target for treating psychosomatic disorders.

So somehow from experiments on rats to find which parts of their brains react to some stimuli, they conclude that humans can get a fever from stress???

Sci hub link to the full paper which is long and detailed and I haven't read.
https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.aaz4639

 

[Peter T]

Is a transient rise in body temperature the same as a fever? Is there evidence that their presumed ‘psychosomatic conditions’ involve symptoms that are the same as stress responses in rats?

Certainly in ME there are disturbances in temperature regulation for some/many, but subjectively for me these are distinct both from fever and from ‘stress making me feel a little hot under the collar’. Subjectively my problems in relation to temperature relate to delays in matching my body to the external temperature, delays in responding to changes in external temperature, a possible hypersensitivity to extremes of hot and cold (both can trigger post exertional malaise) and night sweats.

The closest my temperature issues get to a fever, stress induced or otherwise, is night sweats, which only occur when I am asleep. Unsurprisingly I am not usually experiencing particularly high levels of stress when unconscious.

I have made these remarks without having bothered to read the article, and hopefully the authors would not include ME in their understanding of ‘psychosomatic conditions’ but surely you would need an adequate physiological description of any condition prior to even considering this stress response in rats as a animal model for the human condition(s).

 

[Wonko]

Does this mean that stress can now be successfully treated with cheese?

I've tried cheese, in varying forms, the only result of eating cheese, when feeling the need for cheese, is that you have less cheese.

 

[rvallee]

Is a transient rise in body temperature the same as a fever? Is there evidence that their presumed ‘psychosomatic conditions’ involve symptoms that are the same as stress responses in rats?

That's really the gist here. It's equating two superficially similar things based entirely on superficial traits. It doesn't make it invalid, it's just not the thing they think it is. Which they should be aware of but the psychosomatics belief system pushes all ambiguity in the same direction. The same way as an elevation in heart rate could be described as anxiety, if one is looking for anxiety and squinting to make it out of the noise.

I'm not well-versed at all on this but as far as I know there are two things that conscious, or subconscious, thoughts can change in the body that have been demonstrated: heart rate and body temperature. This is something monks trained in deep meditation can do. With enormous effort, definitely not something one can do casually. But that's about it, those are the two physiological things people can change with their minds in a significant way. Somehow "some things are possible" is twisted in "all things (we want to be true) must be possible", a logical fallacy.

This study is a great example of the fallacies underlying psychosomatics. It sees basically two possible things and extrapolates based on superficial similarity that it must mean everything is possible. Even though only two things of small importance have been found to be, in extreme cases, somewhat possible.

Which is sad because it makes a deeper understanding of those processes almost impossible with all the woo that it becomes wrapped into.

 

[Mij]

Experiencing a rise in body temperature doesn't necessarily cause fever. Stress does bring on hot flashes/night sweats, but my actual body temperature remains normal. It might rise a little but only for a very short period. After that I feel chilled, no amount of blanket/duvet can warm me up.