Battlers who beat disease

The brain and the body’s immune system, which protects us against disease, are closely linked. An American team of researchers discovered this 1984 through a remarkable series of laboratory experiments in which mice where taught how to strengthen their immune defences.

First, the mice where injected with a drug to enhance the activity of their natural killer cells, the immune system’s warriors that deal with unwanted foreign invaders, such as viruses. Simultaneously, the mice were exposed to the smell of camphor. Later, when the mice smelled camphor but were not drugged they bolstered their immune defences.

Other researchers found that brain and immune system communicate through hormones called thymosins and other factors in the blood. The importance of the work is that in uncovers the mechanism of something that doctors have long known, but could not explain: why people who refuse to give in to disease enhance considerably their prospects for eventual recovery.

It may show also why others are illness-prone. Mental stress plays havoc with immune systems. Blood tests of students during exam week showed that their ability to make interferon., a natural protein that counters viral  infection, declined drastically. A study of 117 victims of malignant melanomas recorded that forty of them were given identical medical prognoses. n just over two years, twenty of these had died. All had shown more distress, dejection and anxiety about their malignancy than the twenty who lived.  There are always body wonders.

antibody cells