Christian LM, et al. - Researchers, herein, looked at the associations of postpartum sleep, stress, and depressive symptoms with LPS-stimulated cytokine production among African American and White women. They observed that among African American women, both stress/distress and poor sleep quality influenced proinflammatory cytokine production during postpartum, significantly and uniquely. These findings were consistent with an allostatic load model which predicts that conditions of chronic stress impart vulnerability to dysregulated responses to novel stressor exposures. This work suggests clinical relevance of bidirectional nature of the stress-sleep relationship.