Hartford Magazine | December 2004
By James Battaglio

IS STRESS MAKING YOU SICK?

Trinity College students are flooding the doctor's office at exam time. Professor Lisa-Anne Foster thinks it’s no coincidence.

Year after year, it's the same story. Final exams are around the corner at Trinity College, and like clockwork, there's a surge of students coming down with respiratory infections- Sure, we've all faked a cold or two to get out of a frightful test or paper, but Lisa-Anne Foster, Ph.D., a six-year associate professor of biology at Trinity, says these are no fakers. "Perfectly healthy kids are coughing, sneezing and armed with boxes of tissue as they sit there taking their finals. They seem to develop upper respiratory ailments in April or May, just before the exams. And I, as a microbiologist, am particularly
interested in finding out what triggers this reaction."  read more...