| By Maya Goldman |
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| Illustration: Lindsey Bailey/Axios |
| The 2024 election cycle may be remembered for redefining anxiety and drawing attention to the unique way politics stresses Americans out.Why it matters: Pitched partisanship, razor-thin margins, political violence and a barrage of ads have measurable health effects, including high levels of stress-related hormone in the body that can lead to weight gain, diabetes, heart disease and more.State of play: Experts say the emotional reactions to rallies, debates and nonstop ads transcend generalized anxiety — already the most common mental health diagnosis in the U.S.The physical symptoms are similar but their causes are different.Generalized anxiety disorder can comeon gradually and sometimes for no apparent reason, whereaspolitical stress is specifically associated with an election or other political activities, and it presents even in people who don’t report feeling generally anxious.By the numbers: More than one-third of 1,700 marriage and family therapists surveyed in September described the election-related stress as “more severe” compared with other types of anxiety.Almost half of the therapists surveyed by the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists described excessive worry and strained family relationships as byproducts of election stress.The toll in the last three cycles has been especially hard on younger voters.32% of Americans ages 18-34 reported feeling both nervous and scared about the upcoming election in a poll from American University published last month.There’s also evidence politics could be sending more people to the hospital with life-threatening events. Kaiser Permanente found that hospitalizations for heart attack, stroke and heart failure were 17% higher in the five days after the 2020 election than in a five-day period two weeks prior.”Anxiety has physical manifestations. It creates actual physical health problems in people,” said Jayme Renfro, an associate professor at the University of Northern Iowa who studies biology and politics.Between the lines: Experts say politics can be particularly hard to block out, not just because of all the noise but because of the way it shapes social interactions and one’s individual identity.The lengthy election cycles and bombastic tone of the most recent national campaigns churn negative emotions.And the way politicians on the right and left tap tribal instincts and define “us” and “them” has long-term consequences.Read more from Politico: Pediatric cancer researchers are building a tool to share real-time cancer and rare disease data worldwide with $10 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.How so? The project, called Real-time Analysis and Discovery in Integrated And Networked Technologies, or RADIANT, aims to process millions of cancer data points and make the findings available to doctors everywhere.The effort builds on years of research by the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. It will act as a data coordination hub for RADIANT, integrating patient electronic health records and genomic and imaging data from participating hospitals nationwide. Partner institutions include more than 35 hospitals in the Children’s Brain Tumor Network and the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium.The upshot: Doctors should initially be able to use the tool to offer precision cancer care to their patients. Over time, researchers hope the framework will inform new clinical trial models and improve patient access to them.“Many pediatric brain tumor patients have no curative standard of care , it’s only through advancing new models of care empowered by these technologies that as clinicians we’ll be able to enhance options for our patients and their participation in clinical trials,” Dr. Sabine Mueller, pediatric neuro-oncologist, co-executive chair of the Children’s Brain Tumor Network and co-leader of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, said in a press release. FORWARD THINKING |
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