Is your illness all in the mind?

Hi Dear All,

This one landed in my mailbox a while ago, interesting material.

Happy mind wishes,

Karl

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=608643

Is your illness all in the mind?
There is growing evidence that a patient's outlook on life can affect their
chances of recovering from disease. And having negative thoughts could even
make you sick. Roger Dobson investigates

08 February 2005

Manuela Martinez and her colleagues were intrigued. Why was it that women
who had suffered domestic violence seemed more prone to outbreaks of cold
sores?

On the surface there appeared to be no connection between the physical and
emotional abuse they suffered and the herpes infection that broke out on
their lips. To try to find a link, they carried out a detailed profile of
the saliva of a group of 74 survivors of abuse and compared it to a similar
analysis of other women. They found that the abused women had far fewer
immune-system compounds able to neutralise the virus. Their levels of
antibodies to the virus were also lower. "Our findings confirm that the
stress associated with partner violence could impair health by increasing
the likelihood of viral reactivation and reducing the ability to suppress
virus proliferation,'' says Dr Martinez, of the department of psychology at
Valencia university.

The findings are part of a new and increasing body of evidence showing that
the mind, personality and outlook can influence the development and
progress of disease. New research, some of it being reported at an
international conference on psychosomatic medicine this month, shows that
the mind can have an effect on many conditions, from arthritis to cancer
and heart disease.

Although Western medicine is still largely based on the paradigm that the
mind and body are separate from one another, there is increasing evidence
to the contrary. Such a mind-body connection has been hinted at down the
centuries, but most of the evidence until now has been anecdotal or
inconclusive. But a revival in interest in the mind-body link has triggered
a wave of new research. Doctors in Holland who investigated heart disease
treatments in almost 1,000 people found that patients with so-called type-D
personalities - negative types who have difficulty communicating their
emotions - were four times as likely to have heart problems. The same
findings have now emerged from at least two other studies.

At Ohio State University, scientists have established that there is a
mind-body connection in wound-healing. Their studies found that animals'
skin wounds healed twice as quickly when they had social contact with other
animals. "Stress delays wound-healing, and social contact helps counteract
this delay," says Dr Courtney DeVries, who led the study.

And psychologists at Eastern Michigan University studied the outcome of
bone-marrow transplants and found increased rates of survival among
patients who were more defiant, better adjusted, and less depressed. "This
first large-scale study provides evidence that psychosocial variables can
affect survival,'' say the researchers.

The links don't stop there. Doctors in the UK and Germany looked at 1,300
elderly men and women over 10 years, and found a connection between
personality and cancer deaths. "The results justify belief that certain
types of cancer may be related to specific stress and personality
factors,'' say the researchers. A Japanese study based on more than 30,000
people concluded that personality may affect mortality rates among cancer
and cardiovascular disease sufferers. A second study found that skin cancer
patients who had group therapy had higher levels of immune-enhancing cells.
And in Los Angeles, scientists at the Digestive Diseases Research Center
believe that the mind can even bring about chronic heartburn. "The presence
of a severe, sustained life stress during the previous six months
significantly increased heartburn symptoms during the following four
months. As with other chronic conditions like irritable bowel syndrome,
heartburn severity appears to be responsive to major life events,'' they
say.

A large number of studies have shown that people who are depressed suffer
greater levels of disease and illness, but research is increasingly showing
that happiness and positive attitudes can have the opposite effect.
Scientists in Finland carried out personality tests on 500 older people and
then studied them for a decade. Fifty four per cent of the positive
thinkers were still alive ten years later, compared to 39 per cent of the
others. Those with a negative slant on life were also six times more likely
to be in institutional care at the end of the survey.

At Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, researchers looked at the effect
of humour on heart disease, and found that happy people were healthier. Not
only were they less likely to get heart disease, they were also less prone
to high blood pressure: "The results suggest that the propensity to laugh
may contribute to cardio-protection,'' say the researchers. The mind-body
link has also triggered new treatments. At Stanford University, one team
found that metastatic breast cancer patients who were in a support group
that used self-hypnosis as well as other mind-body techniques lived some 18
months longer than a control group.

With so much research now suggesting powerful mind-body links, the hunt is
on for the mechanisms involved. How can abstract thoughts and feelings
affect the body and influence the development and progress of diseases and
conditions that are so diverse? Prime candidates for bridging the gap
between mind and body include neurotransmitters, the nervous system,
hormones and the immune system.

Stress is heavily implicated, with several studies showing that stressed
people have lower levels of natural killer cells and are more vulnerable to
disease. One study found that students taking exams had depressed immune
systems, while others have shown links between high stress events such as
divorce and redundancy and the onset of disease. People with a large number
of friends and who also have pets have greater immune-system activity.

Stress is known to trigger physical reactions, especially in the
flight-or-fight response to stimulus. But although it's known that stress
can have an effect on the immune system, it is still not known how it can
lead to a specific disease. Researchers in the relatively new area of
psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how the mind and body interact in
health and disease, are dedicated to discovering that mechanism.

One theory is that there is a direct communication system between the
immune system, which orchestrates the body's defences, and the nervous
system, which passes information between the body and the brain. Some
experts believe that nerve endings in the thymus, spleen and bone marrow
are evidence of communication.

But others maintain that the effects of the mind on disease are still
unproven, and that any apparent effects can have different explanations.
Are people with a large number of friends likely to live longer because of
some unknown socialising effect, or because the friends are more likely to
help them through illness? There are concerns too that mind-body
explanations may have an adverse effect on patients with serious diseases,
who may feel that they are in some way to blame.

"It is important to underline the hypothetical nature of these
relationships,'' says Dr Vincent Jadoulle of the Université Catholique de
Louvain. "Psychosomatic explanations risk being used to fill in knowledge
gaps, and to give the illusion that we can avoid or control a disease. They
especially risk making the patients feel guilty for their cancer or its
development."

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Received on Mon Apr 18 2005 - 01:09:42 BST