4.7 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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0:00.0 | I'm Rachel Martin, host of Wildcard from NPR. |
0:02.7 | I've spent years interviewing all kinds of people, and I've realized there are ideas that we |
0:08.4 | all think about, but don't talk about very much. |
0:11.8 | So I made a shortcut, a deck of cards with questions that anyone can answer, questions |
0:16.7 | that go deep into the experiences that shape us. |
0:20.0 | Listen to the Wild Card podcast only from NPR. |
0:24.0 | You're listening to Shortwave, from NPR. |
0:28.9 | Hey, short wavers. |
0:30.7 | I love my job, but I'm going to be honest, sometimes it's stressful. |
0:35.3 | And when I'm stressed, I can definitely feel it in my body, which science journalist |
0:39.8 | Diana Kwan says makes sense. I've reported a lot of stories in the past about the biological |
0:45.5 | effects of stress. Stress can really take a physical toll, but I don't think I realize just how |
0:50.7 | much of a toll until this episode when I called her to discuss the link between stress and aging. |
0:56.5 | And she told me, yep, Gina, there's a whole body of research on this very topic. |
1:02.9 | It just kind of made a lot of sense that stress would affect aging as well because, you know, things like various disorders and diseases, you know, these all affect how quickly we age. |
1:12.6 | She told me about a study researchers did in the early 2000s, looking at stress in 58 biological mothers. |
1:18.6 | About a third or a bit more than a third who had a healthy child and two-thirds who had a child with a chronic illness |
1:25.6 | and they kind of reasoned that this latter group |
1:28.9 | would have higher levels of stress due to having to take care of somebody with an illness. |
1:35.4 | Part of the study included asking those parents about their stress levels, which were higher |
1:39.8 | for the caretakers of kids with an illness. But Diana says this study also did something pretty unique. |
1:46.0 | It was one of the first studies to really bring the stress and aging link to like the molecular level. |
... |
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