Seeing family for the holidays? Scientists discover how the stress might kill you
If you ever thought the stress of seeing your extended family over the holidays was slowly killing you - bad news: a new research report in the December 2009 print issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (http://www.jleukbio.org) shows that you might be right. Here's the good news: results from the same study might lead to entirely new treatments that help keep autoimmune diseases like lupus, arthritis, and eczema under control. That's because researchers from the University of Connecticut Health Centre have found that the same part of our nervous system that is responsible for the fight-or-flight response (called the sympathetic nervous system) also controls regulatory T cells, which are used by the body to end an immune response once a foreign invader has been removed or destroyed...