Stress

Folks today are frequenting spas and massage therapists, signing up for seminars and self-help meetings, hiring personal trainers and nutritionists -- all searching for ways to reduce stress. The ironic thing is, some of these effective stress-busters can be mighty expensive, which in turn can cause stress. You will have put in some long hours at the office to earn that deep-tissue massage to relieve upper-back muscles that are in a knot because you spend so much time at the office. Luckily, Janet's World has a nearly cost-free alternative.

It's crunch time at many college campuses.The coffee is percolating. Almost-new textbooks are cracked open. Fingers click away at computer keyboards from morning until night. The stress level is high as college students across the state prepare for end-of-the-year exams.Too many all-nighters? Got the caffeine jitters?To help students calm their wracked nerves, many colleges are offering some relief. Whether it's free massages or color therapy at Towson University, yoga at the University of Michigan or free Ben & Jerry's ice cream bars at the University of Iowa, colleges around the country are getting into the game.

Women have closed the gender gap in college enrollment, but another gap has widened: College women are working harder and feeling more stress while their male counterparts are having a good time.In a nationwide survey of college freshmen to be released today, women are five times as likely to be anxious as men, reporting they frequently felt "overwhelmed by all I have to do."These young women are smoking more than men. More of them say they frequently felt depressed in the last year, more are worried about paying for college and feel insecure about their physical and emotional health.

BEING A PARENT is hard work, and you need to stay healthy for the long haul. From the time you are eating for two, through the sleepless nights of infancy and into the combat zone of adolescence, being a parent is as much about physical endurance as it is about enduring love.But there is another reason for you to live as though you are in training for a road race -- your kids are watching.Researcher Nicholas Zill, president of Child Trends, a Washington think tank, says in his most recent report that the behavior of parents represents an unexpected but very real threat to their children's health.

Q. My grandson is 2 1/2 years old and extremely bright, but he cannot get to sleep by himself. He sleeps in a futon bed and needs his mother's presence in his bed to fall asleep at night. He seems to have fixated on this security instead of the usual stuffed animal or blanket. At nap time, his mother has been driving him around until he falls asleep.My daughter needs to know how to turn this around. Would getting him a youth bed -- big enough only for him -- work? The problem is compounded now because of the arrival of a little brother.

They're attacked by bugs, left to freeze in the cold, die of thirst in the heat and drown in heavy rains.Plants lead stressful lives, but how they deal with that stress is little understood.That's where Frank Turano comes in.Turano, a molecular biologist at the Agricultural Research Service's Beltsville lab, has spent four years dropping weights on plants, exposing them to extreme temperatures, touching them and grinding up their leaves to study their chemical changes under stress."Plants can't move.

TWENTY-FIVE hundred mourners were dispersing Wednesday after the funeral of an officer killed in a car crash when Baltimore police received more terrible news: One of the force's helicopters had plummeted to the ground. The pilot, a veteran officer, died later that afternoon."The Baltimore Police Department is in shock and disbelief," Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier said of the fatal accidents that brought to 99 the number of city officers killed in the line of duty since 1870.The two victims were dedicated professionals.

EVERY WEEKDAY, Katie McCullough of Annapolis takes her 18-month-old daughter, Alexa, to day care after ushering Stuart, 9, and Madelyn, 7, to their respective school buses. Then she drives to Baltimore, where she works as a receptionist part-time in a doctor's office.Her shift ends at 2 p.m., giving her just enough time to get back home and maybe throw a load of laundry into the washer before the older children return from school.Then it's a round of lessons and practices, picking up Alexa from day care and getting dinner started before her husband, John, gets home from work.

A mortally wounded police lieutenant draws his last breath as a chaplain keeps vigil. An officer shaken after shooting a suspect or despondent because job stress is affecting life at home turns to a chaplain for counsel.As police officers increasingly face lethal confrontations in a city beset by violent crime, and cope with stress on and off the job, chaplains stand ready to offer spiritual support.The demand for chaplains' services is growing as chaplains expand their mission beyond ministering to officers and their families to include families of violent crime victims.

They come one by one, offering gifts with the urgent hopes that good fortune will smile on them in their direst time of need. No, they're not ancient Mayans. They are students at the University of Maryland, trying anything to appease the terrapin spirits of exam week.In a custom that has flourished during the last decade, stressed-out students leave offerings at "Testudo," the terrapin statue in front of the campus' McKeldin Library. By the end of exam week, the bronzed statue is covered in candy, cigarettes, beer, condoms, candles, jewelry, wine, coins, cupcakes, firecrackers -- anything and everything a 300-pound mascot would want.

The Baltimore sports apparel company Under Armour is introducing a line of mouth gear that it says will not only protect the jaw from hits but will reduce stress to improve athletic performance. UA Performance Mouthwear was developed by Bite Tech Inc., a Minneapolis company that has researched mouth products for athletes. The mouthpiece is for noncontact sports such as baseball, running, golf and tennis, and costs $495. The mouthguard for football, hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports costs $450.

In his quest to capture a spot at a top college, Andrew Lutz has done just about everything right at Pikesville High School. He has earned a nearly straight-A average, taking 10 Advanced Placement classes and wrapping up two years of calculus by the end of junior year. He worked on the school paper, played tennis year-round under the supervision of a private coach, and traveled to Ukraine for community service. And yet, when Andrew looks around in his AP chemistry class, he sees himself as pretty ordinary.

Centennial High School, 4300 Centennial Lane, will present the musical Damn Yankees, based on Douglass Wallop's novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, in the school auditorium. Tickets are $8 in advance; $10 at the door. To reserve tickets and pay at the door, e-mail kcarlsen@hcpss.org by 2 p.m. Wednesday. The school's theater department will offer a Ballpark Dinner and Show package on Friday. Dinner will be served from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the cafeteria.

Stored blood more likely to lead to infections transfusions Hospitalized patients who received blood that had been stored for more than four weeks were nearly three times as likely to develop infections as those who received fresher blood, researchers said last week. The blood itself was not infected, but the stored blood's release of chemical agents called cytokines may have affected the recipients' immune systems, rendering them more susceptible to infections, said Dr. Raquel Nahra of Sparks Regional Medical Center in Fort Smith, Ark. The patients typically suffered an increase in urinary-tract infections, pneumonia and infections associated with intravenous lines, but those who were infected were no more likely to die, Nahra told a Philadelphia meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.

Hard times are especially hard on pregnant women. Miscarriages go up, as do premature births. The result: fewer baby boys. Economist Ralph Catalano, professor at the School of Public Health of University of California, Berkeley, showed the connection for the first time in a 2003 paper in the journal Human Reproduction. Researchers have known, based on studies going back to the 1970s, that war and environmental disasters can affect the sex ratio, which normally averages out to about half the babies born being boys and half girls.

Psychology Debt leads to physical pain for millions The stress from deepening debt is becoming a major pain in the neck - and the back and the head and the stomach - for millions of Americans. When people are dealing with mountains of debt, they're much more likely to report health problems, too, according to an Associated Press-AOL Health poll. And not just little stuff; this means ulcers, severe depression, even heart attacks. Although most people appear to be managing their debts all right, perhaps 10 million to 16 million are "suffering terribly due to their debts, and their health is likely to be negatively impacted," says Paul J. Lavrakas, a research psychologist and AP consultant who analyzed the results of the survey.

Until recently, America's combat casualties seemed easy to count. Most came home with visible infirmities. Now, it's apparent there has been a much larger toll, a hidden army of casualties with post-traumatic stress disorder. Last week Pentagon officials reported 115 Army suicides last year, the highest rate on record. They revealed the number of troops diagnosed with PTSD jumped by 50 percent and expressed concern that that the nearly 40,000 stricken soldiers were only a small fraction of the malady's victims.

WASHINGTON -- Army leaders are expressing increased alarm about the mental health of soldiers who would be sent back to the front again and again under plans that call for troop numbers to be sustained at high levels in Iraq for this year and beyond. Among combat troops sent to Iraq for the third or fourth time, more than one in four show signs of anxiety, depression or acute stress, according to an official Army survey of soldiers' mental health. The stress of long and multiple deployments to Iraq is just one of the concerns being voiced by senior military officers in Washington as Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior Iraq commander, prepares to tell Congress this week that he is not ready to endorse any drawdowns beyond those already scheduled through July.

Every couple fights, right? But in terms of their health, what they fight about is less important than how they fight, according to a Gaithersburg researcher. Elaine Eaker, an epidemiologist who operates her own consulting firm, looked at how 3,681 men and women sort out marital differences and tracked their mortality rates and cardiac health for 10 years. She found that women who had reported that they didn't vent during arguments were four times more likely to die than women who spoke up in a fight.

This time of year, there is plenty of advice for reducing holiday stress. Take deep breaths or find a private place to scream out loud. Exercise, or reduce your exercise schedule so you don't stress about keeping up your exercise schedule. Focus on the small joys of the holidays, like Christmas lights or fresh snow, and not the list of things that you have to get done. Don't spend too much. Don't eat too much. Don't drink too much. Be thankful for what you have. Do something nice for someone else.