What is Psychoneuroimmunology?

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is a discipline that studies the connections between the psychology, the nervous system, and the immune system. Named in 1981 by Dr. Robert Ader, an American psychologist. This discipline focuses on how the immune system interacts with the brain to affect health.

Chinese name: Psychoneuroimmunology
Foreign name: psychoneuroimmunology

Applied discipline: psychology
Application range: Social psychology

Definition of psychoneuroimmunology

Root meaning: psycho means "psychology", neuro means "neuroendocrine system" (including nervous system and endocrine system), and immunoology means "immune system".

The discipline concluded that the immune system, like the human brain, is capable of learning.

Research on neurotransmitters (chemical messengers, such as: dopamine, norepinephrine) has shown that the neurotransmitters that are most active in the brain and immune system are also most densely distributed in the neural regions that regulate emotions. From this, it can be inferred that emotions affect the immune system through a direct physical channel (David Felten, Ed's research partner, has found extremely strong evidence to support this inference).

Subjects of Psycho-Neuroimmunology

Psycho-neuroimmunology was proposed in the late 1970s. LaPerriere et al. (1994) believed that psycho-neuroimmunology is a discipline that studies the relationship between psychology, neuroendocrine, and immune parameters. Maier Watkins and Fleshner (1994) consider psychoimmunology to be a discipline that studies behavior, brain, and immunology. Zeller et al. (1996) believe that psychoneuroimmunology is a discipline that involves studying the two-way communication mechanism of the endocrine and immune systems. Ader (2000) proposed that psychological neuroimmunology is a discipline formed by the combination of behavioral, neurological, endocrine, and immunological disciplines. Mausch (2000) proposed that psychoneuroimmunology studies the relationship between stress, psychological disorders and physical health.

Purpose of Psycho-Neuroimmunology

Sali (1997) believes that neuro-immunology is a discipline that explores the role of psychology in the occurrence of disease. Kelley (2001) proposed that the era of psycho-neuroimmunology has entered the era. The mission of psycho-neuroimmunology is to describe the relationship between mind and body, try to understand the relationship between them at the molecular level, and use this knowledge to prevent and reduce people Patient. Coker (1999) believes that psychoneuroimmunology should pay attention to the study of stress, and stress will reduce the role of the immune system in fighting infections and malignancies. LaPerriere et al. (1994) proposed that proper exercise can make asymptomatic seropositive individuals, reduce the impact of adverse factors, and delay the progress of the disease. Rotenberg (1996) proposed that researchers tend to believe that patients with positive coping attitudes can defend against psychological immune disorders; while giving up attitudes will aggravate the development of the disease.

History of psychoneuroimmunology

Scientific findings in psychoneuroimmunology

Western medicine has almost completely denied the connection between human psychology (or mind) and physiological behavior (especially the immune system) since Descartes' "mind-body dualism".

But in 1974, Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of Rochester in New York, performed a classically restricted learning experiment on mice and made a breakthrough discovery (University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry ). In Ed's experiment, he tried to teach mice to link saccharin-containing water to nausea, but the sugar water itself was harmless. On the first day of the experiment, he also fed the mice with sugar water and injected cyclophosphamide (an agent that caused nausea). For the next few days, he fed the mice with sugar water without injecting cyclophosphamide, and recorded the amount of water the mice drank. However, the mice were young and strong, but after a few days, they began to die and die. Ed certainly knows that cyclophosphamide is an immunosuppressant. In addition to causing nausea, it also inhibits the immune system. He suddenly discovered that the mouse not only linked sugar water to nausea, but also linked it to the suppression of the immune system. This is an amazing discovery, because until then, the brain and the immune system were still considered to be two independent and autonomous systems that could not affect each other in this way. Ed quickly collaborated with Dr. Nicholas Cohen, an immunologist at the University of Rochester, to further explore behavior-restricted immune system suppression. The outstanding experiments of the two of them finally made PNI an important subject.

Later, Ed worked with a pediatrician, Dr. Karen Olness, to test his ideas on humans. The subject was a 13-year-old girl named Marette who had severe lupus, an autoimmune disease. In order to suppress the self-destructive immune system in the little girl, the doctors decided to try it all out with cyclophosphamide. However, cyclophosphamide is toxic, and in order to control the dose to reduce the risk of poisoning, they decided to try the restrictive effect at the same time. The doctors also gave her cod liver oil. Because she was not sure that she was more likely to be restricted by smell or taste, she was also asked to smell the smell of roses. After using it three times in this way, doctors began to use cod liver oil and rose scent without using any medicine to alternate with cyclophosphamide. So in six months, Maratti used cyclophosphamide only six times. However, her improvement is the same as the effect that cyclophosphamide can completely achieve, and this result is exciting.

Once scientists believed that the nervous and immune systems would interact, they began to look for physiological connections. After continuous research, the first natural anesthetic in the body was discovered in 1975, which is called ednorphin (also known as brain morphine). Endorphin is a larger chemical called neuropeptide, which is an amino acid released by nerve cells. And neuropeptide may be a link between emotional response and the body's resistance to disease. In addition, hormones are chemicals that "talk" to the immune system, which helps regulate body activities. For example, corticosteroids released by the adrenal glands under stress have been shown to reduce the amount and power of antibodies and lymphocytes.

In response to internal stress, the body's immune system responds. Psycho-neuroimmunology is different from the individual's response to internal stress. It is a research field that studies the individual's response to external stress. It focuses on the relationship between psychosocial processes and neurological, endocrine, and immune system activities. Relationship (Ader & Cohen, 1985; Buck, 1988).

PNI also emphasizes the effect of individual mood states on the immune system. For example, there is a study on the immune system: researchers invited 96 men to report positive and negative things in their daily lives. Prior to the report, each subject was required to take a capsule containing rabbit albumin, and then measured their daily saliva to know the strength of the daily immune response. The results of the study found that pleasant life events lead to a stronger immune response; unpleasant life events lead to a weaker immune response (Zimbardo, 1996).

According to PNI's point of view, people's psychological emotions and beliefs are not related to the well water of the immune system, but are interdependent. Therefore, who says that happiness is not a good medicine?

The Rise of Neuropsychological Immunology

In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet scientists used Pavlov's classic conditioned reflex method to successfully influence the function of the human immune system. Similar studies were conducted by Dolin in the 50s and 60s. This research caused Western scientists value it. The earliest research on this issue in the United States was Dr. Geor Solomon. He repeated experiments in which Soviet researchers destroyed the animal's hypothalamus and weakened the animal's immune system, and got the same results. This shows that the brain can affect the human immune system. He called this emerging discipline psychoimmunology. By doing an aversive taste experiment, Adel believes that the immune system can form conditioned reflexes, and uses a wreath test to verify his hypothesis. He believed that the nervous system played a role in this conditioned reflex immune response, so Ader added neuro, which led to a more precise term, "psychoneuroimmunology".

The immune system has traditionally been considered unregulated by the nervous system, but research since 2010 has shown that there is a close relationship and complex interactions between the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems.

Psycho-immunological stress (psychological stress) can affect immune function

Dr. C. Murry Parkes and his colleagues in the UK published their study on widowers' lifespan in 1969, and they found that the death rate of widowers is surprisingly high-often within six months of the woman's death, and they believe that This is caused by psychological stress damaging a person's defense system. Australian researcher Roger Baitrop and colleagues performed a simple blood test on 26 widowed men and women. They took two blood samples after two and six weeks, respectively, and found from the blood samples that their immune capacity did not decrease after two weeks. However, the responsiveness of immune cells decreased after 6 weeks, and the organization's researchers declared for the first time that "severe psychological stress can cause significant abnormalities in immune function."

In addition, more general stress can harm the human immune system. The experiments performed by Steven.E. Lovcke found that those college students with poor coping ability were under great pressure on the general requirements imposed on them in college life, and their killer cell activity was low.

According to Vernon Riley, as the amount of stress increases, so does the damage to the animal's immune system. He used special feeding methods to make mice develop breast cancer. They put the mice on top of a recordable turntable and then rotated at four speeds-16, 33, 45 or 45 revolutions per minute. 78, resulting in different degrees of rotational stress. It was found that the malignant degree of cancer in mice at 16 revolutions / m was the smallest, and then increased sequentially. The tumor growth in mice at 78 revolutions / m was the fastest.

The above research shows that a negative life event, the so-called stress, regardless of the seriousness of the situation, will suppress the body's immune capacity and affect its health.

(1) The body's immune function can be changed by learning (establishing conditioned reflexes)

In the 1920s, some scholars in the Soviet Union used conditioned reflex methods to change immune activity. Researchers found that if subjects expected an immune response, even if this expectation was not conscious, it would also affect the immune response. The researchers injected 14 children's muscles with gamma globulin, and monitored the phagocyte index of the subjects before and 3 hours after the injection. The experimental results show that the first four injections caused the The exponential increase, but at the fifth injection, although the injection was not gamma globulin but saline, the result also caused an increase in the phagocyte index. The control group of this experiment only injected saline, and their phagocyte index did not change, which indicates that the immune response can form a conditioned reflex.

In 1983, Smith and McDaniel conducted such an experiment with 7 subjects. All 7 subjects responded positively to tuberculin. When tuberculin-positive patients were injected with tuberculin, they appeared on the skin. Erythema and induration, the experimenter injected tuberculin on one forearm and saline on the other forearm, but told the subjects that the two forearms were injected with different concentrations of tuberculin . The subjects in the experiment can clearly see that the high-concentration syrup is always fixedly injected on the left forearm, and it is continuously injected once a month for 5 months. The right forearm did not react, but in the sixth month of injection, the injections in the bottle changed with each other. That is to say, the right arm that was injected with saline was injected with tuberculin, and the right arm caused by tuberculin was found. The response was significantly lower than in the left arm.

The above experiments show that the function of the immune system of animals can be changed by the method of conditioned reflex.

(2) The effects of hypnosis and humor on immune function

The function of the immune system can be changed not only by conditioned reflexes, but also by hypnotic cues.

Ikemi and Nakagawa (1962) used lacquer tree leaf extract as an item that caused contact dermatitis. Thirteen persons with high sensitivity to this substance were used as subjects. The experimenter applied this substance to one of his forearms. , And the extract of chestnut leaves (the substance can not cause contact dermatitis) was rubbed on the other forearm, then 5 of them were hypnotized, and the other 8 subjects were blindfolded, and the main test told The situation of the subjects was exactly the opposite of what was actually applied to the forearm. As a result, all 13 subjects developed contact dermatitis on the forearm on one side of the chestnut leaf extract, while only two people developed on the other forearm. With contact dermatitis, this is enough to show that hypnosis and hints can make a huge difference in the immune response.

A study by Dillon and Baker (1985) showed that 10 subjects had seen a significant increase in salivary immunoglobulin A after watching humorous videos, but the control group had seen "didactic" video tapes , But its content has not changed significantly. Berk et al. Conducted such an experiment. Their subjects were 10 patients, and 5 of them watched humorous TV. The results showed that compared with the control group, these subjects had obvious blastoblast-like transformation of lymphocytes. Increases while cortisol decreases.

(3) Impact of self-control (biological feedback, autogenic training, qigong) on immune function

Elmer.E.Green and Alyce.M.Green reported that a person engaged in auxiliary work suffered from pharyngitis due to streptococcal infection, and the drug treatment was ineffective. Later, a combination of relaxation training and autogenic training was used to treat the disease, which was very effective. it is good.

Smith (1989) used 28 people who were literate in "silent" training, and randomly divided the subjects into two groups, asking the first group to suppress the immune response to shingles, and the second group to improve their Herpes zoster's immune response, the results show that the group of subjects requiring "improvement" is significantly enhanced in terms of skin response than the group of subjects requiring "inhibition". This shows that if a person subjectively wants to suppress his immune response, the immune response of his lymphocytes to the antigen will be suppressed, and vice versa.

Rosen et al. From Zhejiang Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine studied the effect of qigong on immune substances in saliva. The mean value of saliva S-IgA in 30 cases of practitioners before exercise was 6.5 ± 3.5 mg / dL, and it rose to 12.1 ± 5.0 mg / dL after practice, with significant differences before and after practice (P <.01). There was no significant change in the control group (P <.05). The average saliva lysozyme of 38 cases of practitioners before exercise was 76.99 ± 52.92 micrograms / ml, and it rose to 162.95 ± 111.25 micrograms / ml after practice, the difference was significant (P <.01). There was no significant change in the control group.

It can be seen that self-control is a quite effective means to improve immune function by biological behavior. ^[1]