General Adaptation Syndrome

General adaptation syndrome (GAS) is the body's nonspecific physiological response to stressors, as described by Hans Selye. Selye began this work as a young researcher at McGill University in Montréal and published his first article on the stress syndrome in 1936; he later directed the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal. When he exposed rats to prolonged harmful stimuli such as extreme cold, surgical injury, excessive muscular exercise and shock, he found the same triad each time: enlarged adrenal glands, shrinkage of the thymus and lymph nodes, and stomach ulceration. Because very different stressors produced the same pattern, he called the response nonspecific and described three stages: the alarm reaction, the stage of resistance and the stage of exhaustion. He also proposed that failure to cope adequately with stressors shows up as 'diseases of adaptation', such as high blood pressure, gastric and duodenal ulcers and various mental disorders. In nursing, GAS is a teaching model. It is not a diagnosis, a triage score or a prediction that every stressed person moves through three fixed stages....