How does stress affect health? Stress affects your health in a number of different ways, all of them negative. There are quite a few different health problems which can be caused or exacerbated by stress.

According to recent research, as many as 90% of illness may be stress-related. While this doesn't mean that stress is the cause of the illness, stress can be a complicating factor in these diseases. Companies have begun to respond to this information ? stressed employees take more sick days and are less productive. Many companies have started providing employees with stress management training and other corporations have even become active in funding research into stress management.

The body's immune system works less effectively when the person is under stress. So if two people are exposed to a flu virus and one person is under a lot of stress while the other is not, then the person who is stressed is more likely to develop flu (other things being equal). Their immune system is weakened by the stress, so it has less power to fight off the virus.

The kinds of disease which may occur due to stress can vary from person to person. For those who have a predisposition to certain conditions, these will often worsen when they are experiencing stress.

Diseases which may be caused or complicated by stress include:

- ulcers

- migraine headaches

- high blood pressure

- skin disorders (acne, psoriasis, eczema and the like)

- rheumatoid arthritis

- heart disease

- back pain

- depression

- infertility

- erection problems in men

- menstrual problems (in women)

- asthma

- irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)

- eating disorders

- alcohol and drug abuse

- susceptibility to viral infections (colds etc)

Some of these conditions may happen for the first time while a person is experiencing stress, but there is often an underlying predisposition to these ailments. In people with a family history of a disease, it may be a stress related suppression of immune function which allows the disease to surface for the first time.

One person may experience an asthma attack as the result of stress, another heart disease and the third may even develop diabetes as the result of eating in response to stress. The exact health problems depend on the individual.

It is also true that a single person may develop several different health problems as a result of stress ? in many cases, more than one at a time. They may also develop different problems in response to different stress episodes; for example, migraines in one case and back pain another time.

In short, a very wide variety of symptoms can be the answer to the question of how does stress affect health.