In his article, "The Ravages of Stress", Michael D. Lemonick expressed a very interesting study, published on page forty-five in Time of December 1999. In his overview of a study on how stress affects aging he clearly explains the scientific processes that back up the claim. After discussing the folk wisdom that "everyone knows that stress can make you age before you time", all that science had established thus far was that people under chronic stress tend to have weak immune systems and have a higher risk of heart disease. This doesn't prove the new study however.

A team of scientists reported a week before this article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that long-term, insistent stress on mothers can damage the DNA of their immune-system cells in a fashion that could speed up aging. The study originated when Elissa Epel, a psychologist...