It's a Stressful Life for Baboons, Humans

Sept. 22, 2008 — -- Baboons are aggressive, mean-spirited and wild. And when it comes to stress, apparently they are just like humans.

Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has been decoding the mysteries of stress by studying baboons from Kenya's plains, and he discovered that the animal's rank as a leader or a follower had a direct link to the level of stress hormones in its system.

"You're a baboon and you only have to spend about three hours a day getting your calories," Sapolsky said. "You've got nine hours of free time every day to devote to making somebody else just miserable."

Sapolsky's research uncovered that dominant males had the lowest stress levels, while submissive baboons were in worse health with increased heart rates and higher blood pressure.

"Basically if you're a stressed unhealthy baboon in a typical troop," Sapolsky said, "you have an immune system that doesn't work as well. Your brain chemistry is one that bears some similarity to what you see in clinically depressed humans."

And for the baboons, the stress isn't just coming from the daily trials and tribulations of living in the wild.

"They're not being stressed by lions chasing them all the time. They are being stressed by each other." Sapolsky said. "They're a perfect model for westernized stress related disease."

British professor Sir Michael Marmot, who studied the health of civil servants, said the similarities between the baboon troop and humans are startling.

"It showed that the lower you were in the hierarchy, the higher your risk of heart disease and other disease," Marmot said.

In his research Marmot studied Kevin Brooks, a man low on the totem pole and whose work stress literally has made him sick.

"Out of the last three years at work, I've been off sick for probably half that time," Brooks said.

Just as Sapolsky found out more about stress from baboons, he again turned to the animal kingdom to find a solution.