Stress is on the rise, due to the recession. Emine Saner hears how to survive job insecurity, huge workloads and those very long hours

Ruth, a company consultant, used to work 16-hour days. “I would get up at 4am and be at my computer by 4.30am,” she says. “I was working six, often seven, days a week. I didn’t see my husband for months. Even when we’d go away for the weekend, I’d take a laptop. Whenever I complained I was told I wasn’t being paid to complain.”

Ironically Ruth worked for a firm which offered wellbeing at work courses for large corporations. Yet when she asked for her own hours and workload to be reduced, she was simply told to visit her GP for treatment. She coped, she says, by smoking and drinking, “completely the opposite of the ‘wellbeing at work’ message I was promoting every day”.

It came to a head when a colleague questioned Ruth’s ability to take on a project. “I was told that I wasn’t coping and wasn’t stable,” she says. She was asked to visit her GP, but her doctor agreed that she didn’t need to be signed off work, she needed her workload readjusted.

View the full article at Guardian

Every parent of a child with autism wonders what might have caused the disorder. Does it secretly run in the family? Was there a toxic exposure during pregnancy? An infection in early infancy? Was the mother or father too old?

Amy Sawelson Landes of Tarzana, Calif., has asked herself all of these questions, plus one more: Could the fact that she had taken an infertility drug to get pregnant have contributed to her son Ted’s autism? “It was one of the first things I wondered about,” says Landes, who was 37 when Ted was born 18 years ago.

A study presented Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia provides some of strongest evidence to date that Landes might be onto something. The study, conducted by a team at the Harvard School of Public Health, found that autism was nearly twice as common among the children of women who were treated with the ovulation-inducing drug Clomid and other similar drugs than women who did not suffer from infertility, and the link persisted even after researchers accounted for the women’s age.

Moreover, the association between fertility drugs and autism appeared to strengthen with exposure: the longer women reported being treated for infertility, the higher the chances their child had an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

View the full article at Time

Physical and mental health experts have long known that stress lowers immunity. But there are some surprising symptoms you need to know about.

In college Sarah Jenkins was diagnosed with a mild case of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a condition causing gastrointestinal discomfort, bloating, diarrhea and constipation. Since then, “it’s always been manageable,” the now 31-year-old says, adding, “except when I’m under a lot of stress.”

Indeed, in the past six months as Jenkins’ personal life spun out of control, her IBS followed. During this time, she was applying to graduate school for speech pathology, taking prerequisite classes, working at two restaurants and as a tutor and trying to maintain a relationship with her boyfriend.

The result: She either was endlessly on the toilet or had constipation so bad that she could go a week or more without a bowel movement. She also had heartburn so severe she slept sitting up. “I couldn’t be intimate with my boyfriend sometimes because I couldn’t lie down,” Jenkins says.

View the full article at Forbes

Food allergies are serious business — just ask 18-year-old Dane of Charlotte, North Carolina. With milk, eggs, peanuts, shellfish, chicken, potatoes, and garlic, and many other foods, on his do-not-eat list, he suffers from true, life-threatening food allergies.

To avoid a trip to the emergency room, everything Dane eats must be made from scratch: “I don’t eat in restaurants or from vending machines,” he says, “[and] I try not to be around a lot of food, which makes it a little isolating because so much of our culture and socialization revolves around food.”

But there are many allergy sufferers who practice the same devout food avoidance as Dane but don’t really have to, according to a paper published Wednesday in the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association.

View the full article at ABC News