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That stressful final exams can lead to illness is no surprise to John Sheridan, PhD, who began a psychiatry and behavioral sciences department lecture Friday with a statement few could disagree with. "If I asked anyone ‘do you think stress is health-averse’ you would all say ‘yes’, " said Sheridan, the George Paffenbarger Alumni Endowed Chair in Research at Ohio State University Health Sciences Center. While the phenomenon of becoming sick when under stress is well-known, the cause is not. The link between stress and sickness seems to lie with a host of molecules called cytokines that act as a signaling network for the immune system, alerting immune cells to possible invaders. In an effort to understand how cytokine signaling goes awry, Sheridan studied rats placed in stressful situations. He found that none of the normal rat-stressors such as confinement caused the rats to reactivate a herpes virus infection – the virus that causes cold sores in humans. However, when the rats were in a socially stressful situation the virus came back 40 percent of the time. "Clearly stress had something to do with the reactivation of the virus," Sheridan said. He also has found that in socially stressed rats, a class of immune cells called monocytes were unable to respond to a common cytokine. It could be that similar crossed signals are what underlie post-stress illness in humans, he said.
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Stanford Report, August 20, 2003
