Fig. 7.

Physical stress and lung disease in patients with obesity. In addition to mental stress, common physical stressors can also adversely affect the health of patients with obesity (e.g., acute cardiovascular events, cancer, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, and lung infection). The adverse health effects of mental stress are often the result of background predisposition to disease, followed by an introduction of an unhealthful stressor, eliciting a pathogenic body response (sometimes exaggerated) leading to an adverse clinical outcome. Physical stress can follow a similar pattern. The figure illustrates a common clinical scenario of an obesity-related predisposed disease (e.g., lung dysfunction), worsened by the added stressor of upper respiratory tract infection in a patient with obesity-mediated impaired immunity, resulting in severe and potentially life-threatening lung disease [32], compounded by dysregulated immune response (i.e., “cytokine storm”) [33].