Can witnessing a natural disaster negatively impact your health?

By Pol Allingham via SWNS

Witnessing a natural disaster has a negative impact on a person's physical health for over a decade, reveals a new study.

Women who survived the 2004 Indonesian tsunami experienced unusually low cortisol levels 14 years later.

Those most affected were often people who had PTSD symptoms after the wave hit Aceh, Indonesia, on Dec. 26, 2004.

Over a decade later, they were still in “worse physical and psycho-social health” in comparison with those who lived in nearby coastal communities that were not struck by the tsunami.

Cortisol is a stress hormone that rises in flight or fight response, and consistently elevated stress can dysregulate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis where it’s released.

Researchers from a collective of American and Indonesian universities discovered persistent high stress could cause “burnout” of the HPA-axis, producing low cortisol levels in the long term.

Low cortisol levels, like those found in the survivors, could cause fatigue, mood changes, dizziness, weight loss and muscle weakness.

The team note that the damage wrought by the Indian Ocean was visually similar to hurricanes and intense storms that sweep the North Carolina coast.

As a result they believe their research reveals a long-term effect of climate change, when it prompts extreme weather events.

Study lead Professor Elizabeth Frankenberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said: “These effects are greatest for women who reported elevated levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms for two years after the tsunami.

“Lessons learned from following people in Aceh over 20 years provides important insights into the likely longer-term impacts of climate change on populations in the US and across the globe.”

The US researchers have been studying survivors of the Indonesian tsunami, focusing on people they had spoken to before it hit.

Princeton University professor Duncan Thomas co-led the long-term survey called the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), which reached its latest conclusions by testing hair samples from adults 14 years after the tsunami.

Professor Thomas said: “An important finding is that people with low levels of cortisol are in worse physical and psycho-social health 14 years after the tsunami, evidence of the long reach of the stresses of the tsunami and its aftermath.”

STAR involved experts from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, SurveyMETER (Indonesia), Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California.

Its findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.