Stress can make you sick: studies
Mar 24th, 2009 by Bilal Ali
Stress can make certain people sick, two new studies have found.
One found that stress triggers spikes in blood sugar among African-American women who carry extra weight around their middles.
The other showed that some men have a genetic predisposition to produce extra stress hormones when they’re angry, causing not only blood sugar to rise, but also blood pressure.
Both studies were presented at the recent American Psychosomatic Society conference in Chicago.
“Stress will bring out an underlying disease process in people who are predisposed for some other reason,” said Dr. Richard Surwit, chief of Duke University’s division of medical psychology and co-author of the study about black women and diabetes.
Surwit’s study included 62 healthy, non-diabetic black women who had scans and took part in emotional stress tests. They found blood-sugar spikes occurred in participants only when two key factors were present: a lot of belly fat, plus a predisposition to secrete higher-than-normal levels of the stress hormone epinephrine, secreted as part of the flight-or-fight response to danger.
“Patients with higher belly fat do have higher blood-glucose levels,” Surwit said. “But the real impact of belly fat was the interaction of epinephrine. High levels of epinephrine and high levels of belly fat are what seem to be toxic in this population.”
A second study, by another Duke team, found some men have a genetic variant causing them to release twice as much of the stress hormone cortisol when angered. Cortisol is also released by the adrenal gland and is known to trigger elevated blood sugars and blood