Horrible bosses really ARE bad for your health: Chronic stress can lead to heart disease and diabetes, experts warn

Working for a difficult boss can come with stress, long hours and a poor office atmosphere. But new research has found it can also be bad for your health. The stress of working for a bad boss over a long period of time can cause serious harm to employees, the study found. The researchers found that chronic stress causes changes in the gene activity in immune cells. These changes cause the cells to be primed to fight an infection that doesn't exist. This leads to inflammation in the body which is associated with many health problems, including heart disease and diabetes. Scientists at Ohio State University made this discovery while studying mice. Their colleagues at other institutions also tested blood samples from people living in poor areas and found that similarly primed immune cells were present in these chronically stressed people. "The cells share many of the same characteristics in terms of their response to stress," said Dr John Sheridan, associate director of Ohio State University's Institute for Behavioural Medicine Research, and co-lead author of the study. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences