“Occupational Stress and Immune System Alterations: An Analysis of CD4 and CD 8 Changes among Nurses in Private Medical Centres”
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Abstract
Stress may be defined as a state of mental anxiety caused by a challenging situation. In health care, employee workplace stress can have a negative impact on the quality of patient care, and significant effect on the occurrence of health problems leading to change the current working place and job, quit the profession, and interrupt relationship with co-workers. Studies demonstrated that job stressors could mediate the level of immunological biomarkers.
Aim & Objective: To analyse the occupational stress in nurses. i)To study the socio-demographic or job characteristics of nurses ii) To study the changes in immune biomarkers CD4 and CD8 iii) To study the changes in cytokines (IL-2, IL-6, IL-1β, TNF-α and INF-γ)
Methods: Male and Female Nurses of age group 25 to 60 were included. After administering self-reported questionnaires 55 subjects were selected for the study from various private medical centres, Coimbatore. Socio-demographic details and job characteristics were analysed and blood samples were collected for flow cytometry processing of CD4+ and CD8+ cells and cytokines were analysed through ELISA. Statistical analysis was done with SPSS version 22. Results: Overall the study population shows significant changes in CD 8% and IL-6 levels, when compared with different levels of stress.CD 4% showed numerical changes in nurses with moderate stress.
Conclusion: Nurses are sensitive to professional stress due to their intense daily activity. Since there is no specific marker for identification of stress, further studies can be carried out with a larger sample size to prove that CD8% can be used as a specific biomarker for stress analysis.