I have often seen the claim that cortisol mediates stress. But mine and other's clinical (and scientific) experience shows, that this hormone on the contrary, suppresses harmful stress changes in the body. The body in unusual (stressful) conditions has the ability to "fine tune" due to cortisol. That means, that cortisol repays (much reduce) all reactions in the body, except those, which are directly aimed at solving the problem.
Depletion of cortisol indicates, that the stress is too strong, and that the body can not keep control of the stress responses. With a lack of cortisol a generalization (considerable redundancy) of certain reactions in the body happens (e.g. inflammatory reactions), which is causing additional stress. However, even in serious scientific journals it is written, that cortisol is a "stress hormone". This statement is misleading. Cortisol - a hormone that "modulates of stress" as a minimum. Maybe someone shares the same view?
I know that Bauke Buwalda is providing a lot of evidence to that effect in one of his latest articles (The acute glucocorticoid stress response does not differentiate between rewarding and aversive social stimuli in rats).
Renaming cortisol seems unnecessary though. Cortisol is still strongly stress related. It is much like the way we used to look at serotonin in depression; way to simplistic. It is however useful to have serotonin come up as soon as depression is mentioned.
The same is true for cortisol I feel. While I, and likely anyone in the field would agree that we can no longer simply say: high cortisol = high stress, it is still one of the hormones that needs to be mentioned.
So, for quick reference cortisol can still be the 'stress hormone', and nuances can be mentioned when going further into it. It's a good point though.
Another important thing to mention about the cortisol : it acts differenttly if the stress stimullus is acute or chronic. But it continue to be a stress marker!!
Thank you very much for your opinion. I am not denying the important role of cortisol during stress. I want to say that the role of cortisol is to counter the damaging effects of stress.
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