Stress can make you sick

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.

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 pressure.