Treasures, psychoneuroimmunology
Jul. 8th, 2004 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThis morning, my mom and I found some treasures when going through Arnold's papers -- his 1939 Dartmouth yearbook, birth and baptismal records for his sons, certification of his various WWII medals and honors, and an apparently much-prized letter, handwritten to his father in 1913 by the later Nobel laureate John Galsworthy, who wrote The Forsyte Saga. It was exciting to discover all of these things carefully tucked away in his closet.
Today's colloquium at work was Greg Miller from U.B.C., speaking on "Emotions, Immunity, and Health: Tales of Psychoneuroimmunology." We learned that the production of antibodies after getting a 'flu vaccine is negatively correlated with self-reported stress levels (though not with cortisol), and that, at least in the young adults they were studying, the relationship was not mediated by smoking, exercise, and alcohol consumption, but sleep did appear to be a factor. Stress can cause sleep loss, and sleep loss can cause stress, in a "feed-forward loop," and if stress/sleep loss are up, antibody production is down.
We also learned that depression is related to heart disease, and that even a single point measurement of depression in a young adult is a predictive factor of heart disease later in life. Here, the mechanism appears to be inflammation within the heart, as measured by levels of c-reactive proteins and interleukin 6 (and higher levels of the latter can cause higher levels of the former). So, they've found that smoking and latent infections are unrelated to high levels of c-reactive proteins, but adiposity (being fat) is highly correlated, and depression is highly correlated. So next they're going to do a new study, focusing on adolescent females, to figure out the relationship between these factors over time: Does depression lead to weight gain, which leads to inflammation? Or does weight gain lead to inflammation, which leads to depression? Or does weight gain independently lead to depression and inflammation? Interesting questions.
Today's colloquium at work was Greg Miller from U.B.C., speaking on "Emotions, Immunity, and Health: Tales of Psychoneuroimmunology." We learned that the production of antibodies after getting a 'flu vaccine is negatively correlated with self-reported stress levels (though not with cortisol), and that, at least in the young adults they were studying, the relationship was not mediated by smoking, exercise, and alcohol consumption, but sleep did appear to be a factor. Stress can cause sleep loss, and sleep loss can cause stress, in a "feed-forward loop," and if stress/sleep loss are up, antibody production is down.
We also learned that depression is related to heart disease, and that even a single point measurement of depression in a young adult is a predictive factor of heart disease later in life. Here, the mechanism appears to be inflammation within the heart, as measured by levels of c-reactive proteins and interleukin 6 (and higher levels of the latter can cause higher levels of the former). So, they've found that smoking and latent infections are unrelated to high levels of c-reactive proteins, but adiposity (being fat) is highly correlated, and depression is highly correlated. So next they're going to do a new study, focusing on adolescent females, to figure out the relationship between these factors over time: Does depression lead to weight gain, which leads to inflammation? Or does weight gain lead to inflammation, which leads to depression? Or does weight gain independently lead to depression and inflammation? Interesting questions.