Abstract
Stress is a term widely used to describe emotional and biologic responses to novel or threatening situations. (In humans, “distress” is probably a preferable term, referring more clearly to the response rather than to the stimulus.) Riley1 postulated that stress could precipitate overt disease when it occurred coincidentally with an incipient neoplasm or infection. Many ancient observations indicated that failure to cope and noxious affects (distressing emotions) after stress could be factors in the onset and course of disease. Galen pointed out that melancholy women were more prone to cancer than sanguine women2. Similarly, Sir William Osler felt that it was as important to know what was going on in a man’s head as in his chest to successfully predict the outcome of tuberculosis. In the 1920s, in the tradition of Pavlov, European researchers found that immunity could be influenced by classic conditioning, intimating a role for the central nervous system (CNS) in immune regulation3. These early findings were confirmed by the milestone studies of Ader and Cohen, showing that when saccharin was used as a conditioned stimulus, it reduced antibody responses after prior pairing with cyclophosphamide. Twenty years ago, Solomon and Moos4 provided a speculative theoretical framework, integrating emotions, immunity and disease.
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Morley, J.E., Kay, N., Solomon, G.F. (1989). Opioid Peptides, Stress, and Immune Function. In: Taché, Y., Morley, J.E., Brown, M.R. (eds) Neuropeptides and Stress. Hans Selye Symposia on Neuroendocrinology and Stress. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3514-9_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3514-9_18
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