High anxiety

Anxiety disorders can lead to uneasiness, apprehension and ultimately become manifest with compulsions and panic attacks. These disturbances may even be a component of other behavior or psychiatric disorders such as depression, mania or psychosis. The biological basis of emotional disorders are broad and can be the result of multiple components that involve cellular pathways as well as environmental influences. Surprisingly, oxidative stress is one significant component for behavior and emotional disease that has a large impact during psychological illnesses. For example, some clinical studies have suggested that recollection of life events that lead to anger or depression could increase oxidative activity and potentially weaken immune system function within thirty minutes of recalling such events. These oxidative pathways, which may either mediate emotional disturbances or, on the contrary, may be the product of emotional behavior, also can affect other biological pathways that control metabolism and aging to affect disorders such as diabetes and Alzheimer disease. Interestingly, in circumstances that psychological disorders lead to increased oxida-tive stress, these pathways also may serve as biomarkers for disease progression. In this issue of Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, our studies highlight the intimate role played by oxidative stress in several clinical disorders that also may be accompanied by emotional stress in patients. Bouayed et al. delve into the novel role oxidative stress plays with anxiety related disorders and discuss how specific genes can be correlated with anxiety-related phenotypes. They further discuss the interesting and intricate relationship among metabolic pathways, oxidative stress and anxiety. Yet, it is clear that oxidative pathways that emerge as a result of emotional stress may have more protean effects. For example, Gupta et al. evaluated patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma for several parameters of oxidative stress and illustrate that the presence of cancer itself, in addition to other confounding variables such as tobacco consumption, can lead to systemic oxida-tive stress in individuals. Furthermore, immune system dysfunction during oxidative stress that has been reported in patients with cancer also may lead to other abnormalities such as male infertility during acute infections. In the study by Abd-Allah et al., experimental models of sepsis with oxidative stress lead to marked reductions in sperm count and motility, obstruction in seminif-erous tubules and congested blood vessels in testicular sections, suggesting that therapeutics directed against oxidative stress may impart protection against or lead to the resolution of conditions that result in the …