does stress beget stress
âOverall, the evidence is accumulating that chronic adverse stress is bad for the brain during aging,â said Mark Mattson at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore, Maryland. However, it is uncertain if stress somehow causes decline, and if it does, what the mechanisms might be. âI think the best evidence is for stress and cortisol as exacerbative, rather than causative factors, and it is unclear what the magnitude of the effect is.